I wrote recently about the Lync 2013 Test Drive set of Virtual Machines. These are pretty neat, although they are a large download, and expand to a very large size. But worth it for the ease of use. In testing it, I found it uses a lot of RAM, so if you want to run all of the VMs at once, I found I needed 32 GB of RAM. But even then, starting up 7 VMs even on my Precision 7400 box takes a lot of time.
If you just start all the VMs at once, they all grind very slowly to life. It seems to take 15-20 minutes to get it all started – I usually start the VMs and go off and make coffee! A big downside to this approach, and one I regularly confront in the classroom, is that Exchange, Lync and the Certificate Services sometimes do not start or start fully. It tends to be the Lync and Exchange services that fail to start. And while the AD Certificate Services starts up OK, it can end up unable to issue a certificate if requested by Lync’s installation package.
Now this is NOT new. I’ve been seeing it in my classrooms since OCS 2007 days. There are a couple of simple solutions to this problem (and probably more):
First, just start VMs up more slowly – waiting a few minutes between starting each one. If you wait until you can login to the DC, for example, before starting anything else, issues like authentication from remote machines (e.g. the remote machines wants to take advantage of the DC before the DC’s netlogon service is fully up and able to accommodate) just go away. Sufficient staggering of the startup of each VM eliminates the risks of services not starting.
Second, you could create a simple start-up script for each machine that slept for, say 10-15 minutes, then started any un-started services. Once you create the script you could then apply it using local group policy. That way when the three systems start, they wait (till the server calms down a little after boot) and just start any services that do not run. This is more effort than the first. I’ll post that script in another blog post.
So here’s my script that starts up the VM farm:
# Script to start the Lync Test-Drive VMs
Write-Host " Starting Lync Test Drive Farm on $(hostname) at: $(Get-date)"
Ipmo Hyper-V
# First start up Dc, and wait for 90 seconds
Write-Host "Starting DC1 at $(get-date)"
Start-VM -name '2013-DC'
Start-Sleep 90# Now startup Lync FE and wait 7 minutes then start the mgt service
# and wait 4 more minutes
Write-Host "Starting Lync-FE at $(get-date)"
Start-VM -Name '2013-Lync-FE'
Start-sleep 300Write-Host "Starting Lync-Mgt at $(get-date)"
Start-VM -Name '2013-Lync-MGT'
Start-sleep 240# Startup Exchange and wait 5 minutes
Write-Host "Starting Exchange at $(get-date)"
Start-VM -Name '2013-Exchange'
Start-sleep 300# Startup TS then SharePoint and wait 2 minutes
Write-Host "Starting ts at $(get-date)"
Start-VM -Name '2013-TS'
Start-sleep 120Write-Host "Starting Sharepoint at $(get-date)"
Start-VM -Name '2013-SharePoint'
Start-sleep 120# Lastly Startup WAC
Write-Host "Starting Wac at $(get-date)"
Start-VM -Name '2013-WAC'# All done
"-" * 50Get-VM -Name 2013*
# and where are we?
$Username = "Contoso\administrator"
$Password = 'Jasmine1'
$PasswordSS = ConvertTo-SecureString -String $Password -AsPlainText -Force
$CredC = New-Object -Typename System.Management.Automation.PSCredential `
-Argumentlist $Username,$PasswordSS
Get-WMIObject -Class Win32_Service -computer 2013-Lync-FE -Credential $CredC |
where {($_.startmode -EQ 'Auto') -AND ($_.Name -Match "rtc")} | ft -AutoSizeGet-WMIObject -Class Win32_Service -computer 2013-Exchange -Credential $CredC |
where {$_.startmode -EQ 'Auto' -And $_.Name -match 'MSExchange'} | ft -AutoThe results of running this script, which takes around 20 minutes, look like this:
PSH [C:\foo]: C:\builds\Dropbox\Lync Test Drive scripts\Start-TestLab.ps1
Starting Lync Test Drive Farm on Cookham12 at: 10/25/2013 20:51:32
Starting DC1 at 10/25/2013 20:51:32
Starting Lync-FE at 10/25/2013 20:53:03
Starting Lync-Mgt at 10/25/2013 20:58:05
Starting Exchange at 10/25/2013 21:02:06
Starting ts at 10/25/2013 21:07:08
Starting Sharepoint at 10/25/2013 21:09:10
Starting Wac at 10/25/2013 21:11:13
--------------------------------------------------
Name State CPUUsage(%) MemoryAssigned(M) Uptime Status
---- ----- ----------- ----------------- ------ ------
2013-WAC Running 1 1024 00:00:00 Operating normally
2013-TS Running 1 2048 00:04:10 Operating normally
2013-SHAREPOINT Running 0 2048 00:02:07 Operating normally
2013-LYNC-MGT Running 0 564 00:13:14 Operating normally
2013-LYNC-FE Running 3 4096 00:18:15 Operating normally
2013-EXCHANGE Running 1 4096 00:09:12 Operating normally
2013-DC Running 0 1174 00:19:47 Operating normally
ExitCode Name ProcessId StartMode State Status
-------- ---- --------- --------- ----- ------
0 MSSQL$RTC 1648 Auto Running OK
0 MSSQL$RTCLOCAL 1760 Auto Running OK
0 RTCASMCU 2728 Auto Running OK
0 RTCATS 692 Auto Running OK
0 RTCAVMCU 1200 Auto Running OK
0 RTCCAA 4028 Auto Running OK
0 RTCCAS 4252 Auto Running OK
0 RTCCHAT 4504 Auto Running OK
0 RTCCHATCOMPL 4556 Auto Running OK
0 RTCCLSAGT 4612 Auto Running OK
0 RTCCPS 4828 Auto Running OK
0 RTCDATAMCU 4184 Auto Running OK
0 RTCIMMCU 5288 Auto Running OK
0 RTCMEDSRV 5784 Auto Running OK
0 RTCPDPAUTH 6160 Auto Running OK
0 RTCPDPCORE 7384 Auto Running OK
0 RTCRGS 6424 Auto Running OK
0 RtcSrv 6756 Auto Running OK
0 RTCXMPPTGW 6616 Auto Running OK
ExitCode Name ProcessId StartMode State Status
-------- ---- --------- --------- ----- ------
0 MSExchangeADTopology 2756 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeAntispamUpdate 2956 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeDelivery 3020 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeDiagnostics 1380 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeEdgeSync 3116 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeFastSearch 3192 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeFrontEndTransport 3352 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeHM 1600 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeIS 3504 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeMailboxAssistants 3612 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeMailboxReplication 4080 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeRepl 2712 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeRPC 3708 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeServiceHost 4148 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeSubmission 4300 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeThrottling 4516 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeTransport 6392 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeTransportLogSearch 4660 Auto Running OK
0 MSExchangeUM 0 Auto Stopped OK
0 MSExchangeUMCR 2928 Auto Running OK
The use of this script does mean it takes 20 minutes to start up the farm, but that’s time I’d probably spend any way waiting for the VMs to start up and then troubleshoot things to fix what is not working. Since I tend to work with these VMs for several hours at a time, the overhead of the script is minor, and I can easily work around the 20 minutes it takes!
Note also that we looked into the two known troublemakers and saw that all but UM was up and running. Given I’m not yet played with the UM part of the VMs, I’m OK with this for now. Maybe a bit more tweaking.
If you use the script above, test it out in your environment and adjust the sleep times to reflect how long things take on YOUR hardware.
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