Morpheus Integration with Hyper-V/SCVMM – Facing Multiple Issues

[RakaBhai]

Hi Team,
We are currently migrating from VMware to Hyper-V and need to integrate Morpheus with Hyper-V/SCVMM so that we can perform VM provisioning and lifecycle management similar to what we currently do in VMware.
However, we are facing multiple issues with the SCVMM integration and would appreciate any guidance from the community.
Environment Details

Morpheus appliance and Hyper-V/SCVMM are located in different Active Directory domains.
There is no trust relationship between the domains.
Firewall ports 5985 (WinRM HTTP) and 5986 (WinRM HTTPS) are open from the Morpheus appliance to the Hyper-V environment.
A service account from the Hyper-V domain is being used for the integration.

Issue 1: Unable to Add SCVMM as a Cloud
When attempting to add SCVMM as a Cloud in Morpheus, we receive an "Authorization Loop" error.
Troubleshooting Performed

Basic Authentication was initially disabled through GPO.
We enabled Basic Authentication, but the issue still persists.
Morpheus Support provided a Python script to validate connectivity from the Morpheus appliance; however, the test was unsuccessful.
We verified that:

Basic Authentication is enabled.
AllowUnencrypted is set to False.

We are unsure whether the AllowUnencrypted=False setting could be causing the authorization issue.
Additionally, Morpheus Support has advised that the integration should work even without Basic Authentication, but we are unclear about the authentication requirements in a cross-domain environment with no trust relationship.
At this point, we are still unable to add SCVMM as a Cloud in Morpheus.
Current Status
As a workaround, we were able to add an individual Hyper-V host/node as a Cloud in Morpheus. However, we have not been able to integrate through SCVMM, which is our preferred and recommended approach.
Issue 2: Missing Storage and Network Information
After adding the standalone Hyper-V host, we noticed the following issues:
Storage

No storage options are visible within the Morpheus Cloud configuration.

Network

We can only see the VMData network.
In SCVMM, we can see all configured networks/EPGs, but these are not visible within Morpheus.

Has anyone experienced similar issues or successfully configured Morpheus with Hyper-V/SCVMM in a multi-domain, non-trusted environment?
Request for Documentation
If anyone has a detailed guide covering the following topics, it would be greatly appreciated:

Morpheus integration with SCVMM/Hyper-V
Authentication requirements for non-trusted domains
Network discovery and configuration
Storage discovery and configuration
Hyper-V VM template creation
Catalog/Blueprint creation in Morpheus for Hyper-V
Best practices and troubleshooting steps

I have reviewed the available documentation, but many implementation details are not fully covered.
Any help or direction would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Rakesh Gupta

[CalvinZito]

I'm not a technical expert but I'm looking at the Morpheus Enterprise documentation - are you using that to guide you? In the 9.0.0 documentations, this link will take you to the SCVMM section: https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=sd00006670en_us&page=GUID-22EEEC8A-E264-4D1B-9D76-E543DFD3096E.html 

This linke, to the Hyper-V section: https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=sd00006670en_us&page=GUID-BC3CA03C-A804-4838-A462-9DD47EF37FD3.html

According to the SCVMM chapter, Morpheus requires:

• Access to the SCVMM host on port 5985 for agent installation.
• WinRM enabled on the SCVMM controller.
• Morpheus Agent installation on the SCVMM controller.
• A user with administrator privileges.

It says "You will need to open port 5985 in order for HPE Morpheus Enterprise to communicate to SCVMM. You will also want to make sure the SCVMM Controller has WinRM enabled."

[MLorenz]

Hi Rakesh,

Unfortunately, our experience with the Morpheus SCVMM integration has been very similar.

We have been trying to use the integration in a production environment for several years. Although we were able to connect our SCVMM server and inventory existing VMs, we encountered a broad range of defects and functional limitations. Ultimately, these issues prevented us from offering Hyper-V through Morpheus as a reliable, production-grade self-service platform.

Some of the issues we encountered include:

• Incomplete network and virtual NIC discovery: All imported brownfield VMs are displayed as if they have no network connection. Reconfiguring the VMs does not resolve the issue, and, as far as we know, there is no viable workaround.
• No option to select the virtual disk type: By default, Morpheus creates SCVMM virtual disks with the VHD type DynamicallyExpanding. However, our environment requires FixedSize disks. Unlike the VMware integration, Morpheus does not provide an option to select or change the disk type. We considered implementing a custom task to convert the disk after creation, but the PowerShell command Convert-SCVirtualDiskDrive can only be executed while the VM is powered off. This would require downtime every time a disk is added, so we abandoned the idea.
• Unnecessary VM restart when expanding a disk: When a disk is expanded through Morpheus, the VM is always restarted. This is not technically required and appears to be hard-coded into the implementation.
• Incorrect SCVMM Cloud assignment after deployment: After deployment, the VM is not assigned to the correct SCVMM Cloud and must be moved manually. Depending on the permissions of the service account, console access may not work until this has been corrected.
• Incorrect disk naming format: When Morpheus creates a disk for an SCVMM VM, the disk receives a random name such as data-22278270-7g8ajda-98dgawgd-aiowud. In addition, the display name is given a .vhd extension even when the actual disk format is VHDX.
• No proper guest restart: The Morpheus “Restart” action is implemented as a shutdown followed by a power-on rather than as a proper guest operating system restart.
• Incomplete Hyper-V console functionality: Morpheus frequently fails to receive the console signal while a Hyper-V VM is rebooting.
• Morpheus Agent installation only through WinRM: For VMware, Morpheus supports execution through VMware Tools. A comparable mechanism could be implemented for Hyper-V using PowerShell Direct, but this has never been added. As a result, Agent installation depends entirely on WinRM.
• Extremely slow Cloud synchronization: A single synchronization can sometimes take up to 20 minutes. Since the default synchronization interval is five minutes, the next synchronization may start immediately after the previous one has completed. This can make it almost impossible to edit the Cloud configuration reliably. Changes may appear to save successfully but are then overwritten when the currently running synchronization finishes.
• Snapshots are not handled like VMware snapshots: SCVMM snapshots are treated as backups. As a result, it is not possible to create a single ad hoc snapshot. Instead, users must configure a scheduled backup job, which does not meet our use case at all.

We reported a number of these problems to Morpheus Data and later to HPE. Some individual issues were addressed in patches, but at some point meaningful development of the SCVMM integration appeared to stop. The issues listed above still exist today, and I no longer expect them to be addressed in the current implementation.

My remaining hope is that HPE will make greater use of AI-assisted development and rebuild the entire Hyper-V integration as a new plugin. At this point, it would be difficult for the result to be worse than the current implementation.

Approximately one year ago, we were told that the SCVMM integration was planned to be moved out of the Morpheus core and delivered as a separate plugin. We were also told that this rework would address several of the existing defects. However, we have not received a reliable release date, and I am not aware of any publicly announced release of this plugin.

As a result, we eventually stopped our planned Hyper-V rollout. At present, we use Morpheus only for VMware workloads. In our environment, the VMware integration is significantly more mature and stable, and support cases related to VMware are generally handled much more effectively.

Our impression is that Hyper-V and SCVMM have not received the same level of engineering, quality assurance, and product priority as VMware. The Windows-specific implementation also appears comparatively brittle and does not handle real-world SCVMM configurations particularly well.

I also recommend enabling DEBUG logging in Morpheus and reviewing the complete WinRM and PowerShell requests and responses. In our experience, this was often the only way to determine what the integration was actually attempting to execute. The debug output may also show whether the authorization loop is caused by authentication negotiation, certificate validation, Agent installation, or one of the subsequent SCVMM queries.

Based on our experience, I would not assume that the current SCVMM integration provides functionality comparable to the VMware integration simply because a particular SCVMM version is listed as supported.

I hope this helps you set realistic expectations. I would also be very interested in an official response from HPE regarding the current status and roadmap of the SCVMM integration, although I consider it unlikely that they will publish many specific details here.

Regards,
Marvin