I recently needed to update the BIOS on a Dell PowerEdge M610 blade running ESXi 4.1 offsite. The server had an iDRAC Enterprise, giving me access to the local console and virtual media — however, the only BIOS update I could find from Dell was for Windows or DOS. This…
I support multiple vCenter environments. The most recent versions of PowerCLI support this through the use of multiple default servers. When you are connected to multiple vCenters commands such as ‘Get-VM’ will return VMs from both default servers. When you first attempt to connect to a second vCenter server you…
Installed VMware tools using my previous article at http://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/?p=133 Once the tools were install I shutdown the virtual machine and changed the Guest OS from ‘Other Linux (64-bit)’ to ‘Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (64-bit)’. Once I had switched to a supported OS, I was able to add a VMXNET3…
I’m a little bit of a snob…I like using my domain credentials on anything I log into. My favorite ESXi 4.1 feature isn’t the storage performance improvement provided by SIOC or VAAI nor is it the added memory compression technology. Instead, I like using my domain credentials for host authentication.…
In one vSphere environment I support we do not use templates to deploy virtual machines. Instead, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit is used. This allows both physical and virtual servers to be created using the same process and improves overall standardization of the customers network. After several dozen Windows 2008 R2 servers…