Monitoring Hyper-V with Zabbix

Zabbix is a opensource monitoring solution, which helps you keep track of the health of your IT systems.

You can host it on your own infrastructure or use one of the many hosted zabbix SAAS offerings.

A very helpful feature is, to be able to write your own monitoring scripts and integrate them with dashboards and alerts.

Beside a core set of templates and scripts, there also exists a big list of templates and github repositories, which help you monitor almost everything.

If you don't find the perfect template for your use case, then you can still write your own scripts and templates and then integrate them in your Zabbix infrastructure.

For VMWare there is very good support out of the box (At least for the commercial VMWare products).

For Hyper-V from Microsoft there is no such support built it.

For this reason, I have contributed to a project, which was adding hyper-v monitoring to Zabbix.

As the project owner did give up the project, I did tyke over the project and did smal improvements over the years. But as the requirements did start to rise, I had to rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

This way I could start with a clean base and also use all the new features added in Zabbix 4.x - 7.0. Two topics have been very usefull in that part: Calculated/Dependent items and the JSON + JS post- and pre- processing.

The result is a brand new monitoring script and associated templates for Zabbix 7.x and up. You can find the solutions in this github repository.

If you use Zabbix and Hyper-V, give it a try and comment on this post or give feedback via github. I'm interested to hear, what works good and where I could improve the monitoring.

On a technical note, I did heavily use Claude for this new implementation, I will follow up with my learnings of the AI usage for this scenario. As always, there is good and there is bad to tell about, just stay tuned for the next article.

Ever needed to convert a VHD file to a real harddisk?

You probably know the scenario:

The client has started a small project and needed a new server for this.

In these days you useally go for a VM running on a server, and (since it uses few resources) you place the disk content of that VM into a file in the filesystem.
Since it's a small project with small load this is the ideal (cheapest) solution.

A few months later, you realize that this project is not as small as the customer tolds you or is requiring more and more storage place.

So you add more physical disks to the server and make a dedicated mirrored drive for that (once small) VM.

And now you have to transfer the content of the VHD file into the real disk, so you can directly access it with best performance from the VM.
Since MS did not provide a tool for this conversion, you need another tool for it.

There are serveral of them, the simplest GUI tool is Vhd2disk from Sysinternals.

Here is the link to the forum with the download links.

The conversion is very simple, just make sure to select the correct target disk, otherwise you will miss some other data!

Once restored you can change the disk in the Hype-V manager and (if required) expand the volume(s) to take advantage of the additional space.

Hyper-V and current CPU's

You have a brand new installation, with a new server, ms windows 2008r2 server and hyper-v.

You see frequent blue screens (or unexpected reboots) with event log entries
like:

0x00000101 (0x0000000000000019, 0x0000000000000000, 0xfffff88001e5d180, 0x0000000000000002)


MS is aware of the problem and has a hotfix they provide on demand.

More details can be found here:

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B975530&x=11&y=13


Looks like the Hyper-V stuff is still somewhat beta quality.