cnMaestro 6.0 On-prem on Hyper-V

Products cnMaestro
6

cnMaestro On-Prem definitely works with Hyper-V, but is a bit of a pain to get going as Cambium’s default mount points are not very robust, causing the drive order to slip sometimes between reboots. And on 6.0.0, the Hyper-V console will dump to a black screen with Cambium’s default grub config.

Here are some old partial notes, should at least give you a starting point.

Convert disk image format from VMware .vmdk to Hyper-V .vhdx

  • Download and install QEMU for Windows ( need to use qemu-img.exe to handle the disk format conversions)
  • Download and extract the two .vmdk files from the latest primary cnMaestro ova build;
  • Use qemu-img.exe to convert the two disk images from .vmdk to .vhdx:

qemu-img.exe convert -f vmdk -O vhdx -o subformat=dynamic -p "C:\REPLACE_ME_SOURCE_FOLDER\cnmaestro-on-premises_6.0.0-r6_amd64-disk1.vmdk" C:\REPLACE_ME_DESTINATION_FOLDER\cnmaestro_disk1.vhdx

qemu-img.exe convert -f vmdk -O vhdx -o subformat=dynamic -p "C:\REPLACE_ME_SOURCE_FOLDER\cnmaestro-on-premises_6.0.0-r6_amd64-disk2.vmdk" C:\REPLACE_ME_DESTINATION_FOLDER\cnmaestro_disk2.vhdx

Create a legacy Gen1 Hyper-V VM, and attach the two converted drives;

  • Make sure both drives are attached to the same IDE controller AND are in the correct order.
  • Attach a live boot disk for some kind of flavor of Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora; make sure boot order is set to boot from DVD (going to fix the busted mount points first)
  • Power on the VM, live boot from the DVD
  • via Terminal, elevate as sudo;

enumerate UUIDs for the two drives; typically the second drive is the one you need the UUID for, but this order can flip

lsblk -f

temporarily mount os partition 1:

mount /dev/mapper/system-os1 /mnt/

edit /etc/fstab with your favorite text editor, and fix that /mnt/data mapping to instead reference the UUID!

nano /mnt/etc/fstab

final product should look something like

			UUID=SHOULD_ALREADY_BE_SET_CORRECTLY /boot           ext4    defaults        0       2
			/dev/mapper/system-os2 /               ext4    noatime,errors=panic 0       1
			/dev/mapper/system-os1 /mnt/os1        ext4    noatime         0       2
			/dev/mapper/system-tmp /tmp            ext4    noatime,nodev,nosuid 0       2
			/dev/mapper/system-log /var/log        ext4    noatime         0       2
			/dev/mapper/system-swap none            swap    sw              0       0
			UUID=REPLACE_WITH_UUID_FOR_DRIVE2 /mnt/data          ext4   noatime,errors=panic,nofail    0    2

after you save your edits to fstab, we need to fix grub.

umount /dev/mapper/system-os1

mount UUID="REPLACE_WITH_FSTAB_UUID_FOR_/BOOT" /mnt/

nano /mnt/grub/grub.cfg

in grub, find busted line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

and set instead to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""

save, then gracefully shutdown the live boot environment. remove the live boot iso from the VM configuration.

Boot the VM; once the VM finishes booting and if all goes well should you should be able to login with default creds and then see the cnMaestro setup TUI