A Treasure Trove of Technology Tidbits
So, I remoted into a customer site the other day, setting up a new blade HP bl460 blade server. I entered iLO (integrated lights out management) to validate settings, because I wanted HP EBIPA (which works a little like a DHCP server running in the chassis) to configure static IP addresses. I exited iLO thereafter, […]
Many of my customers’ sites use HP blade servers. Depending upon the networking configuration, this means they also use the HP Onboard Administrator and HP Virtual Connect websites. One feature available in HP OA is the ability to open an integrated remote console window to the particular blade server, helping to debug BIOS issues, for […]
Today, I resolved the error “Insufficient resources to satisfy vSphere HA failover level” in VMware vSphere, a high availability error. The issue occurs when you give a larger virtual machine (VM) a large percentage of the resources available in your least powerful host. The error results in a ugly warning message that appears in your […]
This week, I am installing a brand new VMware deployment of VMware 5.5 with vCenter. I don’t have any of the licensing yet, so I’m installing everything with trial licenses, and will get that fixed before putting production virtual machines (VMs) onto this new environment. This situation is quite common, especially when some of the […]
If you recall, I warned you against blindly installing VMware 5.5 upgrade one. There were two reasons for this warning. First, it introduced a pretty severe NFS bug — the NFS mounts would randomly drop and re-connect. Imagine what fun this would be if your databases happened to be attached via NFS mounts?!? Anyway, the […]
Yesterday, we discussed how to upgrade an ESXi 5.1 host to ESXi 5.5 GA, and also why to avoid using ESXi 5.5U1. Today, let’s see how to setup the heartbleed Update Manager baseline so that we patch the vulnerable ESXI 5.5 GA host for the heartbleed vulnerability. This guide assumes you have vCenter and the […]
There are four possible kinds of connectivity storage to VMware: local hard drives on the host, iSCSI over Ethernet, Fiber Channel connections to storage, or NFS mounts over Ethernet. The trend I’ve seen is that more and more customers are moving towards NFS mounts, especially with the newer 10GB Ethernet network ports. So, the recent […]
Recently, I needed to write a script that queried the VMware infrastructure. So, I needed to install the VMware command line interface (CLI) on a Windows machine that would have a scheduled job that ran the script. Whether you are installing the VMware CLI or upgrading the VMware CLI the process is the same, so […]
The Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability has had widespread ramifications, not the least of which is its hit against the virtualization infrastructure many companies implement with VMware. This article explains how to confirm that your VMware hosts and vCenter server are not affected (or affected, as the case may be). Let’s start with the ESXi host. Enable […]
I recently visited a customer who had upgraded themselves from VMware 4.x to VMware 5.1. Looking in their event logs, we found a bunch of virtual machines reporting, “warning message: insufficient video RAM. The maximum resolution of the virtual machine will be limited to 1175×885. To use the configured maximum resolution of 2560×1600, increase the […]