Enterprise Admins.org

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 is usually fine, as you can copy the BIOS files directly to the floppy boot disk, boot the machine with that virtual media and run your update. The bad news was this update rang in at 1.542MB, slightly larger than my 1.38MB free space on a floppy disk.

• Using a Windows XP virtual machine, I created a virtual floppy image and attached it as A:
• In the Windows XP virtual machine, I formatted the disk as a system disk.
• Using WinImage I selected Disk > Use floppy A: and then Disk > Read disk
• Once I had all of my system files in the display, I selected Image > Change format… to create a 2.88MB floppy disk
• I then copied my M610 firmware to the image
• Finally, I saved the image as a .flp file and attached it to the iDRAC as a virtual floppy.

Not as easy and straight forward as I would have hoped, but it worked in the end.  If anyone has a better suggestion on how to make this easier please post a comment and let us (me) know.

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 will receive the following warning.

Working with multiple default servers?

    Select [Y] if you want to work with more than one default servers. In this case, every time when you connect to a different server using Connect-VIServer,  the new server connection is stored in an array variable together with the previously connected servers. When you run a cmdlet and the target servers
cannot be determined from the specified parameters, the cmdlet runs against all servers stored in the array variable.
    Select [N] if you want to work with a single default server. In this case, when you run a cmdlet and the target servers cannot be determined from the specified parameters, the cmdlet runs against the last connected server.
    You can change your preference at any time using  the DefaultServerMode parameter of Set-PowerCLIConfiguration.
[Y] Yes  [N] No  [S] Suspend  [?] Help (default is "Y"):

This can be bothersome if you really want to access multiple default servers. The following command:

Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -DefaultVIServerMode multiple -Confirm:$false

Will set your default server mode to allow multiples.

Proxy Policy    Default Server
                Mode
------------    ---------------
UseSystemProxy  Multiple

Now when you try to connect to a second vCenter you will just connect, no input needed.

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 adapter.

After powering the virtual openfiler box back on I accessed the ‘system’ tab of the web GUI and found the eth1 interface disabled. I enabled the eth1 interface from the web GUI and configured it for DHCP.

I’ve used IOMETER to push about 700GB worth of IO to an NFS share on the OPENFILER VM – all across the VMXNET3 adapter so I’m sure its working 🙂

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. I’ve recently starting poking at resxtop more, which puts me in the vMA more often. Unfortunately it required that I login using vi-admin, a user name that I typically forgot.

The other day while trying to remember my user name and password I found this article:
http://vbl0g.blogspot.com/2010/07/update-vma-40-to-41.html which describes a simple way to setup AD Authentication inside the vMA.

Verify that you have the latest vMA bits

vma-update update

This could take a few minutes to complete if an upgrade is required.

Once you are up to date, you can join AD:

domainjoin-cli join fully.qualified.domain.name username

After a reboot you can login with your domain credentials. The above link also shows how to add AD users/groups to the sudoers file but I did not do that in my environment.

Here are some additional instructions on using the domainjoin-cli from Likewise:
http://archives.likewise.com/likewise-open/docs/domainjoin-cli.8.html

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 had been deployed, we realized that a BDEDrive partition had been created on the boot partition. This partition was in the way and prevented the C: drive from being extended. Here are steps to resolve this issue on existing servers

At a command prompt run:

bcdboot c:\windows /s c:

After the command completes, right click the c: partition in Disk Management and set it as active. Reboot the server, delete the BDEdrive partition and extend the C: drive…

More importantly, this issue needed addressed on future builds to allow more flexible growth of the C: drive (without the required reboot from above). After a quick Google, I found this article: social.technet.microsoft.com… that describes adding the following text:

DoNotCreateExtraPartition=YES

to the CustomSettings.ini file. As described in the article, the cAsE of the DoNotCreateExtraPartition=YES attribute is important. After our deployment configuration management team added this attribute the BDEdrive partition stopped appearing on new builds.