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During the testing of Hyper-V live migration on a freshly built failover cluster (2008 R2), all seemed to work well apart from one Linux (CentOS) VM. It had been running fine on a single Hyper-V server with the integration components installed, however when I tried to do a live migration it failed, not giving much clue why.

Moving the VM to the other node and starting it using the Hyper-V manager, generated the following error…

‘SV04′ failed to start.
Microsoft Emulated IDE controller (Instance GUID): Failed to power on with error ‘a device attached to the system is not functioning’

Failed to open attachment: C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1\Hyper-V\Virtual Hard Disks\SV04.vhd. Error – A device attached to the system is not functioning. (0x8007001F)

After some investigation, I found that the VM would only start on whichever cluster node was the owner of the CSV (Custer Shared Volume). I later discovered that disabling the AV (Sophos in this case) on the node that wasn’t the CSV owner resolved the issue – Odd, as I had added an exclusion for scanning on c:\ClusterStorage\*, seems that the exclusion didn’t quite work with it being CSV due to the way it links into the filesystem… Adding an exclusion for *.vhd, then renabling the AV fixed the issue.

A large percentage of my users access their corporate email and calendars via their iPhones, ActiveSync and Exchange 2007/2010. I started looking into the possibility of a solution where I could remotely wipe the devices when they get lost/stolen/eaten – turns out I already had the functionality but never knew it!! If you’re users have access to Outlook web access they can even do it themselves!

EMC: Fire up the Exchange management console, navigate to recipient config, then mailbox, and find the user that left their phone on the train. Select manage mobile phone from the actions pane. You can then select to remote wipe the device.

OWA: As I mentioned, users can do this themselves… Log into OWA, navigate to options, then phones – you’ll see all your mobile devices, and also a wipe device option. Fantastic!