Enterprise Admins.org

When I setup a vCenter server I typically use a DNS alias (CNAME). This allows me to use a server name that follows an enterprise naming convention, such as S898PAP1B.domain.parent.local, but connect to vCenter with an easy to remember name like vcenter.parent.local.

There are various articles that cover the SSL installation and regeneration process.

However, these never really worked well with my alias. When installing Update Manager a dialog box pops up asking you to select either the name or IP address of how the Update Manager server is identified on the network. This name or IP is then used when Update Manager extensions are registered in the vCenter server.

I’ve tried everything I could think of to resolve this issue. I’ve manually edited the D:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Update Manager\extension.xml file and even updated the vmw-vc-URL attribute of the ADAM distinguishedName CN=com.vmware.vcIntegrity,CN=vCenter_GUID,OU=ComponentSpecs, OU=Health,DC=virtualcenter,DC=vmware,DC=int. None of these changes appeared to work.

Finally, after much searching, I found the following VMware KB article: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1013222 that does work!

D:
cd "Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Update Manager"
vciInstallUtils.exe --vc vcenter.parent.local --port 80 -U  -P  -S extension.xml -C . -L . -O extupdate

Now my vCenter Update Manager is now registered in vCenter using the alias.

I was recently working with a Dell PowerEdge M610 blade server that had a processor problem. During troubleshooting steps, Dell requested a DSET report from my ESXi host. I knew this wouldn’t be a problem as I could use the live boot CD (described here).

After I booted the live CD I was able to run the requested DSET report. However, once I had the report I needed network connectivity to get it out of the live CD environment. The problem is that my network adapters only have 802.1Q VLAN tagged interfaces. To access the network I needed to specify the VLAN ID. This is a very common configuration for ESX/ESXi hosts, but I wasn’t sure how to make it work in the live CD Linux. This wouldn’t be a very complicated configuration for a Linux guy, but as a Windows admin it took me a few minutes to figure out. After some googling, I came up with the following:

vconfig add eth0 55
ifconfig eth0.55 10.55.0.20 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 10.55.0.255 up
route add default gw 10.55.0.1 eth0.55

(Assuming that my interface is eth0, the VLAN ID is 55, the subnet is 10.55.0.0/24, I wish to assign the address 10.55.0.20 and the default gateway is 10.55.0.1)

While using the vMA 4.1 as vi-admin, I noticed that a couple commands I tried to run (for example yum update) would fail because I was not root. When I tried to issue ‘su’ I could not become root either. I found the following article virtuallyGhetto VMware Scripts & Resources with instructions on how to enable the root account.

sudo vi /etc/passwd

When prompted for a password I entered the vi-admin password. As suggested I changed the entry for

root:x:0:0:root:/root:/sbin/nologin

to look like

root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash

However, after enabling the account I still could not login — using root and the vi-admin password. I then logged back in as vi-admin and entered

sudo passwd root

And defined a password for the root account. I am now able to login as root with my root password.

In a previous article Enabling vSwitch Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) I discussed enabling CDP on a standard vSwitch using vMA. Today I deployed the vMA 4.1 and started configuring an ESXi 4.1 host — only to find out that vifpinit had been deprecated in 4.1. Here is a slightly updated post that will do the same thing using the newer vifptarget command:

sudo vifp addserver esxhostname.domain.name --username "root" --password "MyAdminPassword01"
vifptarget --set esxhostname.domain.name
vicfg-vswitch -B both vSwitch0
vicfg-vswitch -b vSwitch0

I had a handful of hosts to configure and was able to paste the above block of code into vMA (using SSH) and configure all of them rather quickly.