lock VM during migration ?

balu T 41

Hi,

Is there a way to lock the virtual machine so that it does not get migrated during the backup. Any WMI or VHD call ?

Appreciate your help.

-Balu

Eric Siron 1,256 Reputation points MVP

2020-08-15T22:44:16.66+00:00

The Hyper-V VSS writer will lock it.

3 answers

Ian Xue (Shanghai Wicresoft Co., Ltd.) 33,376 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2020-08-14T19:24:06.847+00:00
Hi,
Is your VM clustered? You could not disable migration for a specific VM in a failover cluster, but you could prevent the VM from moving to other nodes by removing them from the preferred owners of the role. Here are the steps:

Open Failover Cluster Manager and select the role in "Roles".

Open the Properties sheet

Deselect other nodes in the Preferred Owners list.

Or you could disable migration on a host by running the powershell cmdlet Disable-VMMigration

Best Regards,
Ian

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balu T 41 Reputation points

2020-08-25T11:48:25.987+00:00

Hi Ian, Is there any WMI/VHD call to disable migration ?

balu T 41 Reputation points

2020-10-15T06:37:25.363+00:00

it looks like the disable-migration will lock the entire hypervisor host and not individual VM. Can we use Msvm_VirtualSystemMigrationServiceSettingData settings ==> EnableVirtualSystemMigration parameter...
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TimCerling(ret) 1,156 Reputation points

2020-08-15T12:57:55.313+00:00

Preferred owners does not mean "never go to another node". It means "when moved, look to go to these nodes first, but if they are not available, go to any available node". Disable-VMMigration is to only way to prevent VM migration for the host.
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balu T 41 Reputation points

2020-08-25T07:08:58.697+00:00

I am looking at the WMI and VHD functions in combination with RCT where we lock the VMs during the backup so that they are not migrated.

VMware provides such an option to lock these VMs.
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TimCerling(ret) 1,156 Reputation points

2020-08-25T13:28:28.54+00:00

Eric Siron made a note nine days ago that the Hyper-V VSS writer locks it. So if the VSS writer is in use during backup (to my knowledge, all backup programs use VSS), the VM should be locked.

balu T 41 Reputation points

2020-08-26T06:55:05.843+00:00

We are not using the VSS framework but i wanted to confirm if using the RCT Query* API, does it lock the VM ?

As with the full backup, we cannot use the RCT backup as the API fail with ACCESS_DENIED. so Is there any explicit VM locking mechanism using WMI/VHD (same as powershell cmdlet Disable-VMMigration -- as noted by Ian ) ?

Eric Siron 1,256 Reputation points MVP

2020-10-21T04:44:19.933+00:00

If it's running off of the RCT, then I suppose I'm not sure why you care if the VM migrates. That's all volume-based work. Everything that your API calls read will come from an unmoving, inert VHDX. The hypervisor has to answer for the API calls. It's the host's responsibility to be sure that you can get what you're asking for, not yours.
I don't know how to call these particular APIs, but I do know that if I start a backup with software that is aware of the CBT API and then I try to migrate a VM, I get an 0x8007138d error. I assume that you could try the same thing and see what happens.

balu T 41 Reputation points

2020-11-03T10:13:30.787+00:00

if it migrates during the backup process then the backup might fail or there will inconsistent copy of data being backed up.

You get the error 0x8007138d because the HyperV/cluster manager has locked it and when you try to migrate later on, you will hit with this error.

So i am trying to find the WIN32/WMI API that locks the VM so the live migration fails with 0x8007138d.
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lock VM during migration ?

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