Neil Versus PVS - Part IV - Multiple Sites with KMS

Hi Friends,

Here's an interesting one that I ran into while working with multiple PVS Sites.  After the fact it seems kind of straight forward, but at the time I really had no idea what was going on.

If you take a look at my architecture I have three sites and two PVS servers gong to each site.  Ignore "Site" I was using that for testing.  :-)
 

The thought was with multiple PVS servers, you'll probably start having multiple sites too.  It's also easier with house keeping when you start collecting a lot of servers, volumes, vdisks, etc.  My vDisks are all sitting on a CIFS share so I don't have to have multiple vDisk images, which is VERY handy.  There's only one small problem and I probably wouldn't have discovered it for awhile, but thanks to KMS, my life got very interesting!

I decided to log into UCSPVS3 which was my third PVS server.  I loaded up the Provisioning Services Console and everything looked normal.  I could even manipulate vDisk images mapped to Site 1!  Now that's cool!  Now here's where the problem began.  I went to change the vDisk from Private image mode to Standard image mode and I got this error message:

Unable to map the vDisk.  Mapping was denied by the Server.  Huh?  And when I turned KMS off as an option under vDisk Properties, it switched from Private to Standard image just fine!  So what the heck?

You might be saying, "Just use the Site your vDisk is assigned to Neil!!"  Well, yeah, but isn't the point of having it on a CIFS share is I can share it from anywhere?

Well, not exactly.  So here's something I found out.  When you have the KMS option enabled in the vDisk Properties, the vDisk momentarily gets mounted up as a volume in Microsoft Disk Management on the PVS server you're trying to switch from Private to Standard image.

Here in lies the problem....  I was trying to mount up the volume on a PVS server that didn't have the vDisk assigned to it!  As I said earlier, the only reason I had this problem is with KMS enabled the volume gets momentarily mounted.  So if not for KMS, I probably wouldn't have bumped into this unless I tried to mount up the vDisk.

After the fact it seemed so simple and straight forward, but sometimes when you're lost in the forest, it's hard to see the trees!  :-)

Until Next Time!

-Brain