Troubleshooting CRM 4.0 System Jobs

March 19, 2009 Leave a comment

I stumbled across something I'd never noticed before in CRM 4.0 today, I suppose in retrospect it is pretty obvious, but I thought I would mention it anyway.  It is pretty simply the ability to create a custom view that has error messages for your system jobs.

  1. Go to Settings
  2. Go to System Jobs
  3. Click on Advanced Find
  4. Click on Edit Columns
  5. Wait until this page populates, this can take a while
  6. Click Add Columns
  7. Tick "Error Code" and "Messages", and any other relevant fields if you like!
  8. Click "OK" to leave the Add Column View
  9. Click "OK" again to leave the Edit Columns View
  10. Click "Save As" and put in an appropriate name and click "OK"
  11. Exit the wizard
  12. Refresh your system jobs view
  13. Now in the views drop down your new view should be there

Now by using this view, you will be able to see the error code and the error message.  Very handy!

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SCVMM 2008 R2 Beta Released!

March 15, 2009 Leave a comment

Wow that was quick!  Not even a week ago and I was talking here, and at a presentation I gave to the Brisbane Infrastructure Group about how the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Beta would be available within 30 days.  The SCVMM team has definitely not made me a liar, as here it is already!

https://connect.microsoft.com/Downloads/Downloads.aspx?SiteID=799

So hit up connect now and give it a whirl!  If you are worried about not having the infrastructure to give this a try, then try running it on a virtual machine as this is a supported configuration, even better, on connect you can actually download a VHD file with SCVMM 2008 R2 Beta pre-installed and configured, ready to rock.

If you still aren't convinced, then check out the feature list from my last blog post : 

Support for new features of Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta

  • Live Migration: – Seen through the VMM console, this enables administrators to move virtual machines from one machine in a virtual host cluster to another with no downtime. This allows administrators greater flexibility in responding to planned or unplanned downtime, provides higher machine availability and more robust fault tolerance within virtualized infrastructure. The basic requirements for Live Migration are that all hosts must be part of a cluster and host processors must be from the same manufacturer.  Additionally all hosts in the cluster must have access to shared storage.  No changes are required to existing virtual machines, network, or storage devices in moving from Quick Migration to Live Migration other than upgrading to beta versions of Windows Server 2008 R2 and VMM 2008 R2.
  • Hot addition/removal of VHDs:  Allows the addition and removal of new virtual hard disks (VHDs) on a running virtual machine.  This enables storage growth in virtual machines without downtime.  Additionally, ?live? VHD management allows administrators to take advantage of additional backup scenarios and readily use mission critical and storage-intense applications (eg: SQL Server and Exchange).
  • New optimized networking technologies: VMM 2008 R2 Beta supports two new networking technologies ? Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) and TCP Chimney ? providing increased network performance while demanding less CPU burden.  NICS that support VMQ, create a unique virtual network queue for each virtual machine on a host that can pass network packets directly from the hypervisor to virtual machine. This speeds throughput as it bypasses much of the processing normally required by the virtualization stack. With TCP Chimney, TCP/IP traffic can be offloaded to a physical NIC on the host computer reducing CPU load and improving network performance.

 Enhanced storage and cluster support

  • Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV): Provides a single, consistent storage space that allows virtual hosts in a cluster to concurrently access virtual machine files on a single shared logical unit number (LUN). CSV eliminates the previous one LUN per virtual machine restriction and coordinates the use of storage with much greater efficiency and higher performance. CSV enables the Live Migration of virtual machines in and out of the shared LUN without impacting other virtual machines. Enabling CSV on failover clusters is straightforward and easy to monitor through the VMM administrator?s console; many storage configuration complexities prior to CSV have been eliminated.
  • SAN migration into and out of clustered hosts: This allows virtual machines to migrate into and out of clustered hosts using a SAN transfer, which automatically configures the cluster nodes to recognize and support the new workload.
  • Expanded Support for iSCSI SANs:  Previously, only one LUN could be bound to a single iSCSI target whereas now — with VMM 2008 R2 Beta — multiple LUNS can be mapped to a single iSCSI target.    This provides broader industry support for iSCSI SANs allowing customers more flexibility in choosing storage providers and iSCSI SAN options.

Streamlined process for managing host upgrades:

  • Maintenance Mode:  Allows administrators to apply updates or perform maintenance on a host server by safely evacuating all virtual machines to other hosts on a cluster using Live Migration or putting those workloads into a saved state to be safely reactivated when maintenance or upgrades are complete. Maintenance mode is enabled for all supported hypervisor platforms on Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta.

Other VMM 2008 R2 Beta enhancements

  • Support of disjoint domains:  Reduces the complexity of reconciling host servers with differing domain names in Active Directory and DNS.  In these situations, VMM 2008 R2 Beta automatically creates a custom service principal name (SPN) configured in both AD and DNS allowing for successful authentication. 
  • Use of defined port groups with VMware Virtual Center:  On installation, VMM 2008 R2 Beta will present available port groups for VMM?s use with VMware Virtual Center thus allowing administrators to maintain control over which port groups are used.

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SCVMM 2008 R2 Beta registration open

March 7, 2009 Leave a comment

Beta registration for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 was released just today!

https://connect.microsoft.com/SelfNomination.aspx?ProgramID=3021&pageType=1&SiteID=799

The registration page also lists some of the features of SCVMM 2008 R2, which will tie in pretty heavily with the new Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2

Support for new features of Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta

  • Live Migration: – Seen through the VMM console, this enables administrators to move virtual machines from one machine in a virtual host cluster to another with no downtime. This allows administrators greater flexibility in responding to planned or unplanned downtime, provides higher machine availability and more robust fault tolerance within virtualized infrastructure. The basic requirements for Live Migration are that all hosts must be part of a cluster and host processors must be from the same manufacturer.  Additionally all hosts in the cluster must have access to shared storage.  No changes are required to existing virtual machines, network, or storage devices in moving from Quick Migration to Live Migration other than upgrading to beta versions of Windows Server 2008 R2 and VMM 2008 R2.
  • Hot addition/removal of VHDs:  Allows the addition and removal of new virtual hard disks (VHDs) on a running virtual machine.  This enables storage growth in virtual machines without downtime.  Additionally, ?live? VHD management allows administrators to take advantage of additional backup scenarios and readily use mission critical and storage-intense applications (eg: SQL Server and Exchange).
  • New optimized networking technologies: VMM 2008 R2 Beta supports two new networking technologies ? Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) and TCP Chimney ? providing increased network performance while demanding less CPU burden.  NICS that support VMQ, create a unique virtual network queue for each virtual machine on a host that can pass network packets directly from the hypervisor to virtual machine. This speeds throughput as it bypasses much of the processing normally required by the virtualization stack. With TCP Chimney, TCP/IP traffic can be offloaded to a physical NIC on the host computer reducing CPU load and improving network performance.

 Enhanced storage and cluster support

  • Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV): Provides a single, consistent storage space that allows virtual hosts in a cluster to concurrently access virtual machine files on a single shared logical unit number (LUN). CSV eliminates the previous one LUN per virtual machine restriction and coordinates the use of storage with much greater efficiency and higher performance. CSV enables the Live Migration of virtual machines in and out of the shared LUN without impacting other virtual machines. Enabling CSV on failover clusters is straightforward and easy to monitor through the VMM administrator?s console; many storage configuration complexities prior to CSV have been eliminated.
  • SAN migration into and out of clustered hosts: This allows virtual machines to migrate into and out of clustered hosts using a SAN transfer, which automatically configures the cluster nodes to recognize and support the new workload.
  • Expanded Support for iSCSI SANs:  Previously, only one LUN could be bound to a single iSCSI target whereas now — with VMM 2008 R2 Beta — multiple LUNS can be mapped to a single iSCSI target.    This provides broader industry support for iSCSI SANs allowing customers more flexibility in choosing storage providers and iSCSI SAN options.

Streamlined process for managing host upgrades:

  • Maintenance Mode:  Allows administrators to apply updates or perform maintenance on a host server by safely evacuating all virtual machines to other hosts on a cluster using Live Migration or putting those workloads into a saved state to be safely reactivated when maintenance or upgrades are complete. Maintenance mode is enabled for all supported hypervisor platforms on Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta.

Other VMM 2008 R2 Beta enhancements

  • Support of disjoint domains:  Reduces the complexity of reconciling host servers with differing domain names in Active Directory and DNS.  In these situations, VMM 2008 R2 Beta automatically creates a custom service principal name (SPN) configured in both AD and DNS allowing for successful authentication. 
  • Use of defined port groups with VMware Virtual Center:  On installation, VMM 2008 R2 Beta will present available port groups for VMM?s use with VMware Virtual Center thus allowing administrators to maintain control over which port groups are used.

 Really looking forward to this one, it has the possibility of turning SCVMM 2008 into a real competitor for vmWare's Virtual Center.

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Presenting this month at two user groups.

March 6, 2009 Leave a comment

Just a quick update as I will be presenting this month at two usergroups.

On Tuesday 10th March I will be presenting on System Center virtual Machine Manager 2008 at Brisbane Infrastructure Group

Session #2, Hosting and Self Provision of Virtual Machines with SCVMM w/ Mark Rhodes

Hosting virtualized servers is easy, especially with tools like SCVMM 2008, but giving tools to clients to manage those servers is more difficult.  Mark will demonstrate what his production SCVMM 2008 self-service portal and what you can do with it.  In addition to this he will also about some of the functions he has used since implementing SCVMM 2008 (i.e. P2V, V2V, Archiving of old servers, Managing Checkpoints)

 Mark will also share some of those ?notes from the field? he encountered that may not be immediately obvious during his deployment.

This one is on at 5:30pm at Microsoft's Brisbane office.I will also be presenting at the Brisbane Sharepoint Users Group on the 18th.  I will be talking about hosting, as yet I do not have an abstract on this, but most likely I will cover the benefits of hosting, basic hosting technology and the future of hosted services.This one is at 12:30 at Microsoft's Brisbane Office.

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Content Deployment Error – There is no web named "".

March 2, 2009 Leave a comment

Content deployment seems to be one of those topics that a lot of people tend to avoid, this is most likely because it has a whole host of nuances and subtleties that can make it seem buggy or unusable.

In the spirit of documenting the little quirks of content deployment, here is one I encountered just this week. 

The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Administration.ContentDeploymentJobDefinition (ID d3d7ac13-f785-4f03-8a73-88505cf6ec7b) threw an exception. More information is included below.

There is no Web named "".

I coaxed this error out from a failing content deployment job after chasing wild geese in the form of two error messages :

Publishing: Content deployment job failed. Error: 'System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: The specified indexer value for this collection could not be found or is not unique.
Parameter name: jobId

and

The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Administration.ContentDeploymentJobDefinition (ID ac28b255-0933-4ba0-9458-20bf97f6fcf9) threw an exception. More information is included below.

The specified indexer value for this collection could not be found or is not unique.
Parameter name: jobId

Getting past those two errors was simply restarting the WSS Search and Office Search services via Services, and then starting them up again via Stsadm.  Immediately after this upon the next content deployment push I saw the initial error message with "There is no web named """.

The cause of the message was the transaction log on the database running out of space.  I have seem this happen before if the content deployment push is a large one, in one case we saw the transaction log blow out to over 50 gigabytes in less than an hour.

In this particular case it was because the transaction log was set to autogrow with a maximum size of 6 gigabytes.  As soon as the transaction log was truncated via a SQL backup there was space available and the content deployment could continue!

For sites using Content Deployment regularly I would recommend plenty of disk space, an unlimited transaction log size, and regular incremental backups to ensure the logs are truncated regularly.

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