Got a question from one of our server admins today;
Will the BigFix agent run on Hyper-V Server 2012/Hyper-V Server 2012 R2? To clarify, this isn’t Windows Server 2012 (non-R2 or R2) with the Hyper-V role enabled, but the free product called Hyper-V Server 2012/Hyper-V Server 2012 R2.
I can’t find any official reference for this product being supported by BigFix, so I figured I’d ask if anyone has had any luck installing an agent on one of these. If yes, which version is required? I would guesstimate that 9.0.777+ should do the trick as that’s where Windows Server 2012 R2 is official, and since 2008 and 2008 R2 core was supported I would not expect the lack of a GUI to be a significant problem, but I could of course be entirely wrong here.
@AlanM, hoping you might have some input on this one.
Set up a test Hyper-V server somewhere and try it, let us know if that works at all. That will be the quickest way to find out if at least that part works, and only then does the question of it being officially supported come into play.
@jgstew
Yep, started spooling up a test box yesterday, will let y’all know how it works out.
ETA:
Yep, agent definitely installs just fine. I ran our MSI from the command line of Hyper-V without any switches, and the UI actually appeared. Function testing now to see what BigFix detects it as and what actions I can take on it, particularly with regards to patching.
I’ll get a property created for this and report back; I’m curious if anyone else in my organization has installed the client on their hypervisors. The machine is reporting fine for other properties dependent on various registry keys and WMI inspections, and it’s even reporting some missing patches from EnterpriseSecurity, so for all intents and purposes the client looks good.
Oh, and I talked to our Microsoft rep; Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012/2012R2 is running on the same kernel as Microsoft Server 2012/2012R2, but the Hyper-V Server product is limited to only the Hyper-V role.
ETA:
Results from QnA.exe:
Q: product info string of operating system
A: Hyper-V Server
Patches were installed gracefully following our patch deployment process. My test machine, which was a completely standard Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 with no changes made to the ISO, installed roughly 90 patches after I deployed the BigFix client to it and issued our regular baselines. It’s also showing relevant for 18 various Microsoft KBs ranging from Critical Updates to Hotfixes and Security Advisories.
In short, because Microsoft Hyper-V Server is a pared down version of Microsoft Windows Server all of our processes so far has been entirely compatible. Let me know if you have any other questions.
Absolutely; I’d chalk this up to the fact that Microsoft Hyper-V Server is actually a just a limited version of Microsoft Windows Server product, and not a radically different hypervisor product like vSphere, ESXi, or XenServer.
We now have the agent installed on several production systems with good results, all detected as Windows Server 2012 systems with the product info string specifying Hyper-V Server so I’d even go so far as to say that this should be in the list of supported products.
From the sound of it, I’d agree. Often the list of what is “supported” is more a matter of what has been internally tested and validated by IBM, but in this case it seems like just as much an oversight.
The big question is if you create a PMR to get support from IBM due to an issue on these systems, what will they say? Will you be able to get them to help you at all? Then again, the support here in the forums can often be better than filing a PMR.
That’s an excellent point, James, thanks for pointing that out. I guess the question becomes a matter of how divergent is Hyper-V Server from a Windows Server Core install; from our perspective, only time will tell.
