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About the Author: LukeHuckaba
http://thephuck.com

Hello! My name is Luke Huckaba and I'm an addict. My drug of choice is technology and I'm far from sober. I'm currently a Systems Specialist and specialize in anything Windows-related, Dell server hardware, and Virtualization using VMWare products. In my spare time, when not toying with the above mentioned items, I can be found riding my motorcycle, working on cars, and attempting to play softball. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail with any questions you may have.

How to determine RAM speeds on Dell’s new 12G servers with Intel Sandy Bridge Xeon E5-2600 Procs

Written April 3rd, 2012 by Luke
Categories: Server Hardware
Tags: 12g memory configuration, Dell, Intel Sandy Bridge, R720
No Comments »

I’m sure many of you have dealt with trying to figure out how much RAM you can shove in a box, say an R720, and still keep RAM speeds up. I actually had some docs from Dell, figures, diagrams, graphs, and a few charts. Even then, it was difficult.

Enter the “Dell 12G Memory Solution Tool”. It is a website that allows you to test RAM & CPU configurations to get optimal speeds. For instance, you can select the R720, 2 CPUs, and that you want 256GB of RAM. That’s a nicely sized box for virtualization. The tool tells me I can get 16x 16GB of 2R4 DIMMS at 1333MHz or 1600MHz. Of course, I’m going to go with the 1600MHz! What if I want to bump the RAM? I checked out 384GB & 512GB to see how they stack up; 384GB gives me the option for 24 16GB DIMMS, but drops my speed to 1066; and 512GB has two options, either 800MHz, or 1333MHz (yes please!).

It also shows you some quick price & power consumption rankings on a 1-5 scale.

Pretty awesome, imo! Here’s the link: http://poweredgecpumemory.com/

Next release of #PowerCLI will stop on invalid certificates

Written March 28th, 2012 by Luke
Categories: Scripts
Tags: Invalid Certificate, powercli, powercli 5.0.1, Set-PowerCLIConfiguration
No Comments »

I’m a little late to the game, but finally got around to installing PowerCLI 5.0.1. Upon connecting to my lab vCenter, I learned of the behavior change that will appear in future releases of PowerCLI. In short, you won’t be able to connect.

By default, it’s unset:

To change that, set the Invalid Certificate Action to Ignore:

You simply type this:

set-PowerCLIConfiguration -invalidCertificateAction "ignore" -confirm:$false

It could potentially break all your scripts if you upgrade to whatever’s after 5.0.1.

Function to convert VMs from thin to thick using #PowerCLI & #PowerShell

Written March 20th, 2012 by Luke
Categories: Scripts, Virtualization
Tags: powercli, storage vmotion
4 comments

Most people want to go from thick to thin to save space. I, on the other hand, want to convert my VMs from thin to thick. Thin provisioning buys you time, basically, but what do you do when you’re vastly over provisioned and your VMs are filling up available physical storage? Sure, you can manually go to each VM and use the GUI to migrate them and convert each one to thick. I had a couple hundred that were thin provisioned and needed them converted to thick.

I’ve been moving from 500GB LUNs to 1TB LUNs, so I scripted it out to migrate VMs over, as well as convert to thick using the New-Object cmdlet.

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Easy way to check if your PowerShell variable is an array or not

Written March 14th, 2012 by Luke
Categories: Scripts
Tags: array, powershell, system.array, variable
No Comments »

I had a script that assumes something was an array, then failed when it wasn’t, so I needed a little checking:

$variable -is [system.array] will say True if it is an array, or False if not. You can also do $variable -isnot [system.array] and expect the exact opposite.

I chose to do this:

if($variable -isnot [system.array]){do some code expecting the $variable is not an array}
if($variable -is [system.array]){do some other stuff with $variable[0] being an array}

Use Powershell to change SCCM cache directory & cache size

Written March 14th, 2012 by Luke
Categories: SCCM, Scripts
Tags: cache directory, cache size, powershell, SCCM, smscachedir, smscachesize, wmi
No Comments »

Some of our older servers are running out of disk space on C:, so I needed to change the SCCM cache directory to D:. By default, this is where I wanted it anyway on our servers, leaving C: only for OS-related files. My OSD Task Sequences all have SMSCACHEDIR set to a folder on D in the client configuration step, but I noticed it wasn’t actually working. You know I had to find a way to fix that using powershell :D It actually ended up being really REALLY easy to do…

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VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices fails to start with error code 0

Written March 6th, 2012 by Luke
Categories: Virtualization
Tags: vctomcat, VirtualCenter Management Webservices, vsphere 5
2 comments

Tomcat Java Config

I did an in-place upgrade of vCenter to 5.0 from 4.1 and everything seemed to go fine. When I checked heartbeat, it was barking about some services, so I checked and sure enough, VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices wouldn’t start.

I checked the commons-daemon log file (located here Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\logs) and found this:

[2012-03-01 08:32:36] [info] Commons Daemon procrun (1.0.5.0 64-bit) started
[2012-03-01 08:32:36] [info] Running ‘vctomcat’ Service…
[2012-03-01 08:32:36] [info] Starting service…
[2012-03-01 08:32:37] [error] Failed creating java
[2012-03-01 08:32:37] [error] ServiceStart returned 1
[2012-03-01 08:32:37] [info] Run service finished.
[2012-03-01 08:32:37] [info] Commons Daemon procrun finished

I did some googling, which had suggestions such as lowering the VM heap size from 1024MB to 512MB, checking for port conflicts, etc. What fixed it for me was specifying the location of jvm.dll in the jre that came with the vCenter installation. It’s highlighted in the attached pic, which I installed on D, yours may be different. After that, vctomcat started fine.

NetApp SnapMirror & RDMs – Automated failover

Written March 5th, 2012 by Luke
Categories: Virtualization
Tags: Disaster Recovery, NetApp, powercli, powershell, RDM
1 Comment »

A few months ago, a reader by the name of Tolga ŞENTEKİN came across This Post looking for something to do a little more. Tolga was looking to script out DR for some VMs he has that use NetApp with & without RDMs. He & I spent about three weeks putting a script together to do the following:

Breaks snapmirror replication
Creates flexclones of the replicated volumes (given you’re licensed for it)
Map them to the esx hosts on the disaster recovery site
Adds and resignatures the LUNs and adds the VMs inside them to the inventory
After that, if you have RDM LUNs attached to the VMs, you first remove the old RDM Mappings from the VM and add the actual LUNs in the disaster site with the same LunID’s
If it’s all done you can start the Vm’s in the disaster site.

Tolga wrote the vast majority of the script, with me only contributing some of the datastore, LUN, & iSCSI stuff.

I uploaded it and have provided a link, since I didn’t want it to get sauteed up from a C&P.

Click HERE to download a copy of the script (right-click, save-as). Obviously, you will need to edit & fine tune for your environment, but he & I wanted to share with the community.

Error 25085 – Setup failed to register VMware Update Manager extension to VMware vCenter Server

Written November 4th, 2011 by Luke
Categories: Virtualization
Tags: 4.1, 4.1u1, Error 25085, Update Manager, vcenter, VUM
1 Comment »

I upgraded my vCenter to 4.1u1 while my VUM was still 4.0 (u2 iirc). I decided to upgrade my VUM to match, and all was going well until I got this message:

Error 25085 – Setup failed to register VMware Update Manager extension to VMware vCenter Server

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Function to export VMs with thin provisioned disks to CSV file

Written September 12th, 2011 by Luke
Categories: Scripts, Virtualization
Tags: powercli, powershell, thin provisioned, vmdk
No Comments »

I wanted to know how many disks in our environment are thin provisioned, so I wrote a quick function to export that list to a CSV file.

I have it pull the VM name, vmdk path & name, Size in GB, and if it’s Thin Provisioned (Boolean, which should always be true).

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function to list all VMs with Snapshots

Written September 12th, 2011 by Luke
Categories: Scripts, Virtualization
Tags: Find Snapshots, powercli, powershell, Snapshots
No Comments »

Using the PowerGUI, you can list all snapshots, but unfortunately, it doesn’t list the parent VM.

I wrote a quick little function to search all VMs that have snapshots and list them.
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Author Archive

How to determine RAM speeds on Dell’s new 12G servers with Intel Sandy Bridge Xeon E5-2600 Procs

Next release of #PowerCLI will stop on invalid certificates

Function to convert VMs from thin to thick using #PowerCLI & #PowerShell

Easy way to check if your PowerShell variable is an array or not

Use Powershell to change SCCM cache directory & cache size

VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices fails to start with error code 0

NetApp SnapMirror & RDMs – Automated failover

Error 25085 – Setup failed to register VMware Update Manager extension to VMware vCenter Server

Function to export VMs with thin provisioned disks to CSV file

function to list all VMs with Snapshots

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