If you have a Hyper-V cluster in a HP Server farm then you may face with low live migration performance. We realized that HP 300 series G6 and G7 servers shipping with energy saving mode. Let’s check that from HP website.

In the ProLiant 300-series G6 and G7 RBSU, the HP Power Profile defines three possible configurations of some of the power features identified earlier in this section. The HP Power Profile provides a simple mechanism for users to configure the power management options of their system based on their tolerance to power versus performance without having to individually configure each option.

There are three possible settings for the HP Power Profile: Maximum Performance; Balanced Power and Performance; and Minimum Power Usage. An additional Custom setting is simply any combination of user settings that do not match the pre-sets for the three categories listed below.

If you want to increase performance of live migration process, you need to disable c-states from BIOS. C-States has a huge impact on live migration. Since HP comes with Balanced Power and Performance mode, it also activates C6 state on BIOS. That’s reason of the issue. So changing HP Power Profile to “Maximum Performance“, you disable C-States from BIOS and get maximum performance from Live migration. As you see our servers can utilize 99% of bandwidth.

So it’s not a good thing to use “Balanced Power and Performance” on Virtualization. Get away from it :)

You may get this error when you try to start maintenance mode on a Hyper-V host.

SCVMM can not live migrate virtual machines if a shared ISO file is attached. So that can pause maintenance mode if you choose live migration mode.
You can execute following Powershell codes to find VMs which have shared ISO files.

Get-VM | Get-VirtualDVDDrive | where {$_.ISO -ne $null} | ft Name

If you’re looking for a specific Hyper-V host called Host01:

Get-VMHost Host01 | Get-VM | Get-VirtualDVDDrive | where {$_.ISO -ne $null} | ft Name

Deattach shared ISO files from VMs and start maintenance mode again.

You may get this error when you try to refresh virtual machine.

You should refresh cluster configuration to fix this issue. Go to one of the Cluster nodes.
Execute the commands on Powershell:

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Import-Module FailoverClusters
Get-ClusterResource -c CLUSTERNAME | where {$_.resourcetype.name -eq 'virtual machine configuration'} | Update-ClusterVirtualMachineConfiguration

After that, you can refresh Cluster and VM from SCVMM console. That should fix the issue.

Before installing FFmpeg-PHP, you need to install FFmpeg, MPlayer and MEncoder for video processing.
I posted an installation guide for them. You can reach it from this post:

Because I have CPanel on my CentOS, I won’t install Apache, MySQL or PHP. I’m just going with FFmpeg-PHP installation.
If you need Ruby on Rails, you can also install it via CPanel scripts.

So I assume you did previous installations. Now let’s go with FFmpeg-PHP installation.

1. Download ffmpeg-php in to /usr/src directory.

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cd /usr/src
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/ffmpeg-php/ffmpeg-php/0.6.0/ffmpeg-php-0.6.0.tbz2?r=&ts=1365651935&use_mirror=garr

You need FFmpeg, MPlayer and MEncoder for video processing. I’ll show you how to install and configure it on Hyper-V.
I’ve already posted couple of articles about CentOS 6 installation on Hyper-V, so I won’t mention about that again.

You can see CentOS 6 installation on Hyper-V at the following posts:

So I assume you have a CentOS 6 with Hyper-V LIS v3.1. So lets continue with our installation.
First, we need to install RPMforge repository on CentOS 6.

1. Install the DAG GPG key.

rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt

First part, we installed required components for Cacti. In this part, we’ll install and configure Cacti.

After MySQL installation, first we should set MySQL root password.

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mysqladmin --user=root password p@ssw0rd!
mysqladmin --user=root --password reload

Let’s download latest Cacti release.

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cd /home
wget http://www.cacti.net/downloads/cacti-0.8.7g.tar.gz

Untar tar ball.

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tar -zxvf cacti-0.8.7g.tar.gz
cd cacti-0.8.7g

Create the MySQL database for Cacti. You have to type your root password to create database.

mysqladmin --user=root create cacti --password

Import the default Cacti database.

mysql -u root -p cacti < cacti.sql

Create a MySQL username and password for Cacti for security reasons.

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mysql -u root -p mysql
GRANT ALL ON cacti.* TO cactiuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'cactipass!';
flush privileges;
exit

Edit “include/config.php” and specify the database type, name, host, user and password for your Cacti configuration.

nano include/config.php

Move Cacti files into /var/www/html for web access.

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cd /home
mv /home/cacti-0.8.7g /var/www/html/cacti

Go into Cacti directory and set the appropriate permissions for graph/log generation.

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cd /var/www/html
chown -R apache:apache cacti

Add a line to your ”/etc/crontab” file.

nano /etc/crontab

Disable SeLinux to web restrictions.

nano /etc/sysconfig/selinux

Reboot your server to apply changes. After reboot, go to php.ini configuration and change timezone.

nano /etc/php.ini

We finished Cacti installation. Now go to your web browser and connect to http://yourserverip/cacti.

Choose “New Install” and click next.

Correct RRDTool default path.

Now Cacti is online!

You can login to Cacti with default username and password. After your first login, you should change password.

Now you can start adding your graphs :)

Cacti is one of the best snmp based monitoring software. I’ll show you how to install and configure it on Hyper-V.
I’ve already posted couple of articles about CentOS 6 installation on Hyper-V, so I won’t mention about that again.

You can see CentOS 6 installation on Hyper-V at the following posts:

So I assume you have a CentOS 6 with Hyper-V LIS v3.1. So lets continue with Cacti installation.
Cacti requires that the following software is installed on your system.

It’s time to install Apache on CentOS 6.

yum install httpd

Type “y” and press Enter to accept installation.

Now, start the Apache/httpd.

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chkconfig httpd on
service httpd start

Now let’s install PHP.

yum install php php-mysql php-snmp php-xml

Type “y” and press Enter to accept installation.

Now we will install MySQL.

yum install mysql mysql-server

Type “y” and press Enter to accept installation.

Now, start the MySQL/mysqld.

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chkconfig mysqld on
service mysqld start

It’s time to install last component, RRDTools. First, we need to install required dependencies.

yum install cairo-devel libxml2-devel pango-devel pango libpng-devel freetype freetype-devel libart_lgpl-devel

Type “y” and press Enter to accept installation.

Install gcc to compile RRDTool.

yum install gcc

Type “y” and press Enter to accept installation.

Download latest RRDTool.

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cd /opt/
wget http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/rrdtool-1.4.5.tar.gz

Untar tar ball.

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tar -zxvf rrdtool-1.4.5.tar.gz
cd rrdtool-1.4.5

You need to set PKG_CONFIG_PATH.

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/pkgconfig/

Now let’s configure and install RRDTool.

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./configure
make
make install

After installation is completed, let’s test RRDTool.

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cd /usr/local/rrdtool/share/rrdtool/examples/
./stripes.pl
ls -l
cp stripes.png /var/www/html/

Lets see our test graph:

We finished installation of required components for Cacti. Next part, we will see how to install and configure Cacti.

You can continue with Part 2: