A few years ago, we were one of the first/early adopters of UCS. At that time, it was clearly in it’s infancy and not ready for prime time, our local Cisco guys didn’t even know anything about it. If you care to read those previous posts, they can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. I was fairly bitter when I wrote those, but with good reason. I ‘wasted’ a lot of time (read weeks or months) jacking with it and had nothing but problems. Read the rest of this entry »
Author Archive
Cisco UCS Blade System – Part 4 – A much needed update
Written May 11th, 2012 by Luke
Categories: Server Hardware, Server Management, Virtualization
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Categories: Server Hardware, Server Management, Virtualization
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Updated: Finding WWNs for HBAs in ESXi hosts, now with get-vmhosthba
Written May 7th, 2012 by Luke
Categories: Server Hardware, Server Management, Virtualization
1 Comment »
Categories: Server Hardware, Server Management, Virtualization
1 Comment »
This is an update to my original get-WWN script using Get-View. Get-VMHostHba was pointed out to me by Robert van den Nieuwendijk, vExpert 2012, so I wanted to provide an update to my original post HERE. I attached the ps1 file at the end.
With the addition of get-vmhosthba in PowerCLI, you can get this information somewhat easier. At line 46
$hbas = Get-View (Get-View (Get-VMHost -Name $vmhost).ID).ConfigManager.StorageSystem
becomes
$hbas = Get-VMHostHba -vmhost $vmhost -Type FibreChannel
Since that pulls only fibre channel HBAs, the foreach changes to simply $hba in $hbas, and the if statement is no longer needed (line 47-50):
foreach ($hba in $hbas){ $wwpn = "{0:x}" -f $hba.PortWorldWideName Write-Host -foregroundcolor green `t "World Wide Port Name:" $wwpn }
Here’s the new version –> Get-WWN.ps1
Installing Windows Server 8 Hyper-V 3 in ESXi 5
I found several posts regarding ‘nesting’ hypervisors (installing a hypervisor within a hypervisor), since I wanted to test out Hyper-V in a VM, and followed this one from William Lam. It worked to allow Hyper-V to pass validation, but after a few reboots, I’d get the dreaded “Windows can’t boot” screen. You have the option to continue, which only reboots to this screen; repair, which gives a command prompt and a few other options; or power off.
<– I would get this far, reboot 3 times, then Windows Server 8 would die, as follows.
<– First option would end up back here
<– Second option above ends up here
I tried the typical bootcfg commands, but it couldn’t read the boot.ini. Some other tests were showing the disk was read-only, which was strange. William’s post was for 2008 R2 and not Windows Server 8, but it worked for the most part. I did have a few other issues I worked through, continue reading for those and how I fixed them. Read the rest of this entry »
Script to join ESXi 5 hosts to Active Directory for Directory Services Authentication
I’m getting ready to upgrade a ton of our ESXi hosts to 5 and wanted a quick way to join all of them to AD after. I could probably do a fresh install and incorporate this into my ESXi Config Script, that’s a consideration, but for the time being, a script that targets clusters, folders, vDCs, etc, will work. The script can also target individual ESXi hosts, they do not have to be joined to vCenter.
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Some thoughts on the Cisco Cius Android tablet – User Review
I’ve been using a Cisco Cius 7″ Android tablet for several months now and am starting to have mixed emotions about it. Initially, I loved it, especially since it now has 2.2.2 (Froyo) and Google’s updated Play Store. It also allows side-loading of apps, so I have the Amazon Appstore, plus Cisco’s AppHQ. Overall, it’s fairly snappy, but is Atom-based (at 1.6GHz), so custom ROMs are pretty much non-existent.
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Initial thoughts of the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook, unofficial review
I received a demo of the Ultrabook and I have to say I’m pleased out of the box. It’s obvious it took some cues from the ‘other’ laptop, and it’s nice. First thing I noticed is how light and thin it is. It’s probably as thick as my Viewsonic G Tablet, and boots faster. I timed it, from the time I pressed the power button, until I had a mouse pointer without the ‘wait’ signal, was about 20 seconds. The windows boot logo never even finished! Craziness.
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Where will virtualization be in 12, 18, and 24 months from now? Please respond with your thoughts…
Everyone has ideas of where virtualization is heading, what it will look like, and how everything’s moving to cloud computing. I’ve pretty much built our internal cloud, and it’s somewhat limited to PaaS, with a move to include SaaS. I’m curious to see what everyone thinks about PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, and virtualization overall over the next two years.
Unable to edit or delete wireless profiles or networks in Windows 8, use netsh wlan to fix!
I was playing with my wifi AP and turned SSID broadcast off. Of course, several wireless machines on my network wouldn’t connect because they weren’t configured to connect if the SSID wasn’t broadcast. They all were an easy fix, except for my Windows 8 test laptop. Read the rest of this entry »
Creating Certificates for VMware SRM or vCenter using openSSL made easy, with Video!
Some of the documentation around creating certificates for vCenter or SRM seems to be lacking, so I documented a few steps for each and outlined the differences, also created a video :)
This can be done from any machine, as long as openssl is installed. If you’re creating/requesting multiple certs, create folders for each request and work from within there so you don’t mix them up. I use d:\cert\vcenter and d:\cert\srm. I added “D:\OpenSSL-Win32\bin\” to may path variable so it’ll work in any folder I’m in.