A Treasure Trove of Technology Tidbits
This year, I have been busy upgrading customers from VMware 5.0 to 5.1. Next year promises a flurry of upgrades to VMware 5.5. One significant change in VMware involves how it deals with credentials and integration with Active Directory. New for 5.1 is the Single Sign On (SSO) service and its associated underlying database. This […]
Today, I needed to install VMware command line interface (CLI). So, I downloaded the latest version 5.1 from the VMware website onto a Windows 2008R2 server. Then, I proceeded to run the installation, only to receive the error message, “The PowerShell execution policy of this computer is not set to RemoteSigned. This prevents execution of […]
So, as you may know, HP has released new versions of their chassis firmware, this includes release 4.10 of the Virtual Connect (VC) firmware and release 4.01 of the Onboard Administrator (OA). The OA upgrade is fairly trivial, and can be done by navigating to your HP OA website and telling it to update itself, […]
Today, I was helping a new customer with their VMware 5.1 vCenter server. When I looked in the Plug-Ins menu | Manage Plug-ins… menu item, I noticed that two plugins were reporting errors. The plugins effected were “vCenter Service Status” and “vCenter Hardware Status”. Both were reporting “The following error occurred while downloading the script […]
The snapshot capabilities in VMware (and other hypervisors) make it really convenient to test applications. You can take a snapshot, install an application, do some testing, and then revert the snapshot. Effectively, bringing your guest virtual machine back to before the application was installed, and thus not leaving all the debris typical of uninstalling an […]
I have noticed a problem when I remotely configure Linux/Unix machines using the VMware console. The problem is duplicate unwanted keystrokes (aka dupe keys) that cause me to backspace too often, as I enter command line commands. This is particularly an issue with passwords, since you cannot see exactly what you are typing into the […]
Today, I needed to upgrade HP’s Integrated Lights Out (iLO) management software. The servers I needed for upgrading iLO were running VMware 5.1 and sitting in HP’s c7000 chassis. I wanted to proceed with a rolling upgrade, where I put a server into maintenance mode, upgraded it, and then placed it back into production. Here’s […]
This post shows the steps to perform a VMware host upgrade for VMware ESXi 5.0 to ESXi 5.1 using Update Manager. Before you begin, you need to follow these steps to import the new ESXi image into Update Manager. These steps were documented in post ABC. Put your host in Maintenance Mode: Open the iSphere […]
VMware vCenter 5.1 can manage both VMware 5.1 ESXi hosts and VMware 5.0 ESXi hosts. But, VMware vCenter 5.0 cannot manage VMware 5.1 ESXi hosts. This means that if you are upgrading VMware in your infrastructure, you need to first upgrade vCenter and then upgrade your hosts. There are two approaches to upgrading the VMware […]
So, today I wanted to forward VMware ESXi host syslog data to my newly installed Splunk server. “No problem,” I thought to myself. But, strangely, my changes did not result in any actual data being collected. It turns out that the VMware firewall blocks outbound syslog by default, and so I had to change its […]