vExpert 2011: Thank you!

Posted on July 1, 2011 by brian.wuchner

I woke up this morning to find a shocking email from @jtroyer…it started like this:

We’re pleased to designate you as a vExpert 2011 as recognition of your contributions to the VMware, virtualization, and cloud computing communities.

This is very exciting news for me, as previous recipients of this title have been both mentors and role models to me for years.  Thank you to all those who read this blog and to the selection committee for selecting me. I am honored and humbled to receive such an award.

 

 

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VMware ESXi Purple Screen of Death (PSOD) on Dell Server

Posted on June 21, 2011 by brian.wuchner

Last week I was informed of a customer who had a Purple Screen of Death on a Dell PowerEdge R810 running ESXi 4.1 Update 1. The stop screen showed the following reason:

LINT1 motherboard interrupt. This is a hardware problem: please contact your hardware vendor

After working with Dell tech support, the customer was directed to disable the C States and C1E settings in the BIOS. I was interested in this setting as I have a cluster using the same hardware with the same version of ESXi.

The following article describes C States and specifically the C1E setting; it is a method to reduce power consumption by powering off cores when not in use: http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/Impact+of+C1E+on+PowerEdge+11G+Servers+–+HPBD+100909.

The VMware Performance Best Practices Guide (available here: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere4.0.pdf) specifically states on page 15 to “Disable C1E halt state in the BIOS.”

I don’t spend a lot of time changing settings in the BIOS, but with the possible impact of this setting thought this was worth sharing.

Posted in Virtualization | 6 Comments

64bit DOS commands with a 32bit (two-bit) application

Posted on June 10, 2011 by brian.wuchner

This week I worked with a group of people that have a monitoring application — basically a glorified task scheduler for 32bit DOS applications. Among other things, this application attempts to check Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS) failover status and send emails (using BLAT.exe) in the event a cluster was unbalanced. The code was no longer working after moving to Windows 2008R2. While helping them debug code, I realized that the ‘cluster’ command was not producing any output; likely due to the 32bit mode scheduler. A quick Google search came up with a simple solution — use the Windows SYSNATIVE directory instead of SYSTEM32 (http://www.tipandtrick.net/2008/how-to-suppress-and-bypass-system32-file-system-redirect-to-syswow64-folder-with-sysnative/).

However, updating the code caused a slight problem because the sysnative path was not available on their down level clusters. Here is a very simple workaround, but one I thought worth mentioning:

if exist "C:\Windows\sysnative\cluster.exe" (
set clusterPath="C:\Windows\sysnative\cluster.exe"
) else (
set clusterPath=%windir%\system32\cluster.exe
)

echo %clusterPath%

This batch file code checks for the existence of the sysnative\cluster.exe and if it is not available fails back to the previous path. A very simple solution, but the customer is happy.

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PowerCLI vCheck 5.40

Posted on May 31, 2011 by brian.wuchner

The other day I noticed two bugs in version 5.38 of the vCheck script. This minor update resolves those bugs and adds a check for 4.1 hosts without Active Directory authentication configured.

# Version 5.40- bwuch: Host version greater than/equal 4.1.0 and AD Auth not configured
# Version 5.39- bwuch: bug fixes from 5.38 version

5.39 – Bug fixes to resolve issues with re-use of global variables in version 5.38 (a description of these bugs can be found here: http://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/scripting/powercli-vcheck-5-38/#comments)

5.40 – added check based completely on LucD’s Get-VMHostAuthentication function available here: http://www.lucd.info/2010/07/25/script-vsphere-4-1-ad-authentication/. This check looks for hosts running ESX/ESXi 4.1 or higher without Active Directory authentication setup. This check can be disabled by setting $ShowHostADAuth to $false

You can download the updated version here: vCheck5.40.ps1

Please feel free to leave a comment with any suggestions or problems you may encounter.

Posted in Scripting, Virtualization | 11 Comments

Export, Compare, and Synchronize Active Directory Schemas

Posted on May 18, 2011 by brian.wuchner

I’ve had this link in my notes for a long time. I’ve only used it twice, but thought it was worth sharing. If you ever need to make a test Active Directory for some really crazy testing, and you’ve ever extended the schema, you may want those extended attributes. There is a really good article over at Microsoft Technet that walks through this process: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.schema.aspx?pr=blog

I’ll generalize the steps…but this is basically what is going on:

  • Exporting the existing schema using LDIFDE
  • Comparision to another schema using AD DS/LDS Schema Analyzer
  • Exporting the schema differences (using AD DS/LDS Analyzer)
  • Importing the schema differences into the target forest

The instructions are pretty straight forward, so just take a look here if you are interested: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.schema.aspx?pr=blog

Posted in Messaging, Scripting | 1 Comment