Gregg Robertson

April 13, 2010
by Gregg Robertson 2 Comments

Host cannot download files from VMware vCenter Update Manager patch store. Check the network connectivity and firewall setup, and check esxupdate logs for details.

This error has been haunting me for quite some time now. When I tried to setup and get VMware update manager working late last year I came across the above problem. I did some fixes but none seemed to work and due to there being a very large amount of work happening I put it on the back burner. Now if you have read my blog posting about the distributed virtual switches you would have seen the need to keep your servers up to date on the latest patches as well as the obvious reasons of security and bug fixes.

So early March this year I decided I was going to get VMware Update Manager working so I didn’t have to use esxupdate to patch my vm’s. My previous problem I believed were down to me using an older version of VUM and possibly because I had it installed on a highly utilised Virtual Centre Server I decided to build a dedicated server for VUM and do it all to the exact specifications VMware tell you to and install the latest version.

Seeing as I have spent some time trying to get this problem fixed I have found some brilliant blog postings and tips for fixing this problem as well as others that stem from this error.

Jason Nash’s (@nash_j) blog posting was probably my first port of call when I tried to fix the problems I was having last year and I still checked the DNS settings this time to make sure everything was as it should be.
The next one was from a VMware communities posting someone had put up with problems sounding very close to the problem I was having. One of the replies recommended checking that the update manager port is open on the esx hosts firewall which is a very important part to check as by default this isn’t open and so can cause you problems with Update manager.
Next is the one I kept coming across and is the one I felt was causing my problems when I installed it previously. This is the problem where the port information in the vci-integrity.xml file is incorrect. For me this wasn’t the problem as it has now been fixed in Update Manager 4.0 Update 1 but if you are using the previous versions of update manager this is more than likely your problem and the steps should fix your problem. Personally I installed Update Manager 4.0 update 1 Patch 1 to make sure all the bugs I could possibly avoid I would.

There are also so many great resources of how to setup and manage VUM I decided it would be helpful to list the links I used to to set it all up as VMware have done some brilliant videos detailing the processes.

First set of steps I used was the video demo by VMware of how to install vCenter Update Manager 4 Update1. (Warning these are videos that need to be downloaded and you will need Adobe Flash player to view them). I would also recommend using the VUM sizing estimator to make sure you allocate the correct amount of space for the database and patches repository. The first bit I had to/chose to do differently was inserting the ip address of the Update Manager server in the server name filed in the installation to make sure that if there are any problems with DNS the server is obviously still accessible. The next bit was for the creation of the ODBC DSN when creating the SQL server instance for the update manager database. Due to me installing it on a x64 machine I had to create the ODBC via the odbcad32.exe application as in the ESX and vCenter Server Installation Guide , on page 72 it is tells you this which I noticed when installing my Virtual Centre server on a x64 server and this “fix” also applies to the database setup for Update Manager even though it doesn’t seem to be included in the latest documentation :

Even though vCenter Server is supported on 64-bit operating systems, the vCenter Server system must have a 32-bit DSN. This requirement applies to all supported databases. By default, any DSN created on a 64-bit system is 64 bit.

Next I used the steps detailed in the video demo by VMware of how to setup baselines and baseline groups to setup my baselines and baseline groups.
Then finally I used the guided tour demo to scanning and remediating with VUM. to do my scans and obviously remediate my esx hosts.

Thankfully now it’s all working correctly and I can finally use Update Manager.

Gregg Robertson

March 27, 2010
by Gregg Robertson 1 Comment

All things virtual VII

There’s been a very good amount of news this week and I’ve really been able to grow my knowledge on things I wasn’t that strong on and better my knowledge on things I think my knowledge is fairly good on.

Firstly a big thanks to Nick Weaver for adding me to his blogroll. Nick is a fellow professional I look up to and to be added to his blogroll means so much to me. Thanks Nick hopefully my blogs make your decision the right one!!

This past week has been dominated by the news and release of veeam’s latest product Surebackup. The features and possibilities of the software have been covered so well by such top people I won’t even try detail it. First person I saw to get a blog posting out for it was Arnim Van Lieshout (@avlieshout) followed shortly by Lode Vermeiren (@lode) with his Veeam unveils SureBackup and there are so many other blogs out there but these two with the official page covered everything I needed to know about the product. I’m planning on testing the Veeam software soon to see if it fits our requirements here.

Eric Sloof let out that VMware are indeed going to be rolling out new certifications to bridge the gap between the VCP and the VCDX. After hearing that there are over 53,000 VCPs, of which over 15,000 are VCP4s (and this was said in early February so I’m sure there are a large amount more now) I’m strongly feeling the need to start trying to build myself up in preparation for the VCDX.

Talking of the VCDX, Eric and Duncan Epping both blogged this month about the release of the new VMware vSphere Design Workshop. Eric explained the course layouts and the dates he will be running the course himself. Whereas Duncan has gone into detail all about the course and what it entails. I’m hoping to get on the course really soon as unfortunately the current dates aren’t possible due to work constraints and planned work.

On twitter recently I noticed Kendrick Coleman planning to run Nested VM’s and hadn’t tried the process myself so I did some researching of it’s possibilities and the changes you need to make and found a great document on the VMware Communities about the changes that need to be done.While on Kendrick’s site I noticed he found the solution to the jumpy mouse problem in Windows 2008 R2. I tried the solution myself and it works perfectly!!! Just a warning though that even though it’s possible to do this for non R2 2008 servers, once you apply the newer driver and reboot the machine your video won’t come back .Thankfully I did a snapshot in case this happened.

One of the consultants here asked me about mismatches between a clients vcentre memory utilisation and the virtual machines task manager values. So I knew a few ideas like checking that the latest vmtools are installed so that performance reading could be conveyed to the virtual centre server correctly but also I had come across a document a while back while having the same problem in my home lab by David Ball detailing a way of fixing the problem.

There has been some major virtualisation news coming out of Microsoft over the past few weeks. Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit) covered it so well that I would highly recommend reading his blog posting covering it. The part of “Rescue for VMware VDI” promotion really brought a smile to my face.

Mike Laverick of the chinwags fame has recently released a new book he has been working on called Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0. Mike has set an amazing example and has given the book out for free in return of people making a donation to Unicef for the download of the book. So make sure you make your donations and get downloading/printing. I’ve already got my hard copy on the way. Also if you haven’t been listening to Mikes chinwags then i would firmly recommend them as they are great for a bit of news and banter from some of the top names in virtualisation. Virtumania is another weekly/fortnightly podcast that is growing exponentially in the industry for having the hottest topics and discussions. It’s hosted by Richard Brambley (@rbrambley) and is well worth the listen.

Gregg Robertson

March 24, 2010
by Gregg Robertson 1 Comment

How to ease the management and monitoring of VMware Snapshots

Recently I have been doing some cleaning up of old snapshots that users have created and forgotten to delete and have therefore been around for too long and are in danger of either using up all the space on the datastore they are on or corrupting once the snapshot is ”deleted”/applied to the vm. I came across an additional way I can make my management and monitoring snapshot tasks easier and so I though I would write up a quick post of all the tools I use that save me having to manually go through a crazy amount of machines. I have used a few of my fellow virtualisation friends scripts and tools to help me do this.

First and the one i use the most is the SnapReminder script by scripting guru Alan Renouf. Alan’s script is a fairly straight forward one (his words not mine as I’m not at the level yet to be able to write this). The script is simple yet so very effective as it automatically finds the snapshot that meets your time criteria,finds out who created it ,retrieves their mail address from AD and mails them reminding them that they have this snapshot and it is older than a number of days. It’s really great when you get a mail back from a user replying to one of these mails and saying they don’t need it anymore as you know it’s going to make your environment better while you barely had to do anything to remind and alert them to it.
Next is part of the vCheck daily report ,one I have spoken of before which is also created by Alan. The vCheck tool is a brilliant reporter for gathering all the information you need to know to make sure your environment isn’t having any problems and enables you to be proactive so as to stop problems before the arise. The snapshot part of this report is always helpful so i know if people have removed their snapshots after being pestered by the SnapReminder e-mails and gives me a good idea of my progress in minimising the amount of snapshots over the limit.
Last one is one I stumbled across this morning while researching some other things and is one i didn’t think of creating but is one that is a brilliant idea especially for automated monitoring. Sadly i can’t seem to find the name of the guy who wrote up the article and did the video as i like to give credit where i can but good work to them for doing a video of it. The article shows and details how to configure VMware vCenter Server to send alerts when virtual machines are running from snapshots and reach a certain size. I’ve always used the alerts for memory,cpu and hosts errors which are pretty much the standard ones you get with vSphere with the additional and tweaking of a few to customise it for our environment but I’ve never thought of it for alerting me about snapshots.

Hopefully these tips and tricks will help save you some time and heartache with the management and monitoring of your companies snapshots.

Gregg Robertson

Technorati Tags: VCP4,VMware,VCP,virtualisation,snapshots,vcheck,snapreminder

Flickr Tags: VCP4,VMware,VCP,virtualisation,snapshots,vcheck,snapreminder

***UPDATE****

As is my luck ,on the heels of me posting this Alan brings out his latest instalment of vCheck, version 5. This new one has some brilliant features and really is an improvement over the last one. I’ve already given it a run over a few of the environments I support and the webpage view it now allows you to view the report in is actually a bit overwhelming with all the data and reporting you get back and has flared up some warnings i didn’t even know were there which is brilliant!

Also a quick congrats to Alan who has now become the latest member of Chad Sakac’s vSpecialists. A brilliant hire there if I do say so myself and very exciting for an EMC employee like myself that someone like him is now part of the team.

March 15, 2010
by Gregg Robertson 1 Comment

All things virtual VI

It’s definitely been a very hectic past few weeks for me and due to this it’s taken me quite a while to get this posting to a post able standard. There has been some brilliant articles and news in the virtualisation arena and some resources that are currently and will in the future help me to make my daily job a lot easier.

First is one that i think is a common mistake among many people when they plan/build their VMware virtual environments.Craig Risinger has posted a guest posting on Duncan Epping’s yellow bricks website all about resource pools and how people need to keep an eye on the amount of resources allocated to a resource pool compared to the amount of machines that are in the resource pool. It does seem a very obvious thing to monitor but I even had to run an eye over the ones in my environment as with the amount of migrations and builds that happen it’s something you forget to check or amend.

Next is a great article I found when trying to explain blocks sizes to a fellow IT friend and about alignments and what both are and what you need to think about in your decision of aligning your data or not. Steve Chambers (@stevie_chambers) wrote the article and is one that I learnt some more from as well as helped me to refresh some of the knowledge i knew but due to not having used it for ages had forgotten some of.

Another posting is stumbled across these past few weeks that caught my interest was a posting by Ian Koenig all about IO DRS. This is a fairly new idea to me as I’ve obviously always done cpu and memory DRS as it’s standard to monitor and make changes dependent on vSphere’s DRS clusters settings but Ian has done a very intriguing and exciting posting all about IO DRS and how it could come very soon to allow you to monitor and make changes dependent on IOPS and details how it would all work. I then did a bit more research on the topic and it seems I’m not alone in my interest and excitement about this feature. Rich Brambley (@rbrambley) wrote a blog posting all about it and detailed some of the things that were mentioned about it at this years VMware Partner Exchange.

Fellow Saffa , Rynardt Spies’(@rynardtspies) has written up a very detailed and thought provoking posting all about VMware vCentre 4 Design Considerations and has given all the pro’s and cons he took when deciding 32bit or 64 bit, physical or Virtual and placement of the vCentre database as well as the Update Manager Server and database.

Simon Seagrave (@kiwi_si) has done a very clever and interesting 5 minute video reviewing vkernel capacity view and how it works and looks. An application I haven’t tried myself but a it’s nice to be able to get a quick run through of what it is and does.

The infamous Eric Sloof (@esloof) posted up his vmClient last week. the tool looks amazing is something everyone needs to have a try out of as it has helped me tremendously by allowing me to quickly jump between virtual machines while trying to do loads of things at once. He’s also done a great video run through of how it looks and works

While listening to the VMware Communities podcast about ESXi last week I was reminded of the latest release by trainsignal the VMware Pro Series Training Vol1. As i mentioned in my posting about the resources i used for my vcp4 exam, the trainsignal videos are priceless in your studying and preparing for the exam as well as a very helpful tool if you need to refresh your knowledge on things you may have become rusty on. I’m planning on getting my hands on this latest instalment but if Kendrick Coleman’s(@kendrickcoleman) twitter and blog posting about it are anything to go by it should be brilliant.

Vladan Seget has posted a great little posting on how to add a second service console via cli. This caught my attention firstly because I’m personally trying to do more and more via vma and cli to prepare myself for ESXi as well as very good troubleshooting step by step.

David Convery has done a very interesting posting all about the problems he encountered with his vshield zones and the ways he got around them. I’ve been planning to implement vshield zones into my home lab for a while but haven’t got around to doing it yet, so David’s posting is now one of the pointers and steps I’ve added in my implementation of it.

Over the past week there has been a major buzz all about the release of simdk. Andrew Kutz(@sakutz) is the man behind this creation and what a little creation it is. Andrew has managed to create a VMware vSphere4 simulator which provides vSphere4 API-compatibility. I’m seriously excited to get it implemented and deployed in my lab environment as it should allow me to get so much more of my testing done and hopefully will save me some money in my VCDX lab deployment. I’m also keeping my eye on the official site of the product for any news and update.

Lastly one from my daily troubleshooting. While migrating machines to new hosts we noticed that certain machines network cards were unticking the connected radio box in the vm’s settings

Even if we ticked connected and applied the changes it kept on reverting back to being unticked. My colleague Simon Phillips noticed the solution, that we had created the vSwitches with the standard 24 ports and therefore once we had reached that number of ports used there were obviously no more spare ports and so the machines couldn’t be connected. There were no errors telling us this was the problem but it’s a very good example that early simple planning and configuration would have fixed.

Gregg Robertson

Technorati Tags: VCP4,VMware,VCP,virtualisation

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March 8, 2010
by Gregg Robertson 5 Comments

VM’s can’t ping while on Distributed Virtual Switches VLAN’s

This blog posting has been sitting in my drafts for a few weeks now as I’ve been battling and troubleshooting for ages so that I could give the solution to all our Distributed Virtual Switching problems we’ve been having. Thankfully I believe I finally can although I’m amazed that this may be the only blog out there with a solution. I put this down mainly due to Distributed Virtual Switches only being available in the Enterprise Plus edition of vSphere and therefore not many people either feeling the need to get this version or their companies not seeing the need to buy the edition. Thankfully I work for EMC and therefore I was able to procure myself a licence key for this edition and so set myself on the way to many eventual problems.

As I said in my communities open question the machines always seemed to fall off at differing times and showed no kind of patterns. Later on I noticed the machines were for some reason losing their ARP tables. The solution I found was one I am still unable to find a VMware article about.

It all came down to a difference in ESX versions and virtual hardware. Not 3.5 and vSphere(I’m not that thick…often) but the build versions. It seems that ESX servers installed with builds pre update 1 and ESX servers with update 1 installed don’t communicate/lose connectivity between themselves. So for instance when i had five servers on an ESX 4.0.0, 175625 build(pre update 1) and five on an ESX 4.0.0, 208167 (update 1a) build the ten total servers initially will all communicate fine with no problems, but then over time all the machines on the pre update 1 host will lose connectivity to both the machines they are on the same host as as well as the machines on the update 1a host and the outside world(aka the lose all connectivity). The five servers on the update 1a host though won’t lose connectivity to each other (although if the dns server they are using is on the pre update 1 then obviously dns will be lost) or to the outside world.

So the steps i followed to fix the problem were:

Firstly upgrade the hosts to the latest versions. This can be done by VMware Update Manager if you have it setup in your environment or by the way I did it with esxupdate. Now I know loads of you who have been in the virtualisation field for a while will know this tool well as it was the only tool you could use pre esx 3.5 to update your machines and I’m still puzzled why the vSphere Host Update Utility cannot patch or upgrade ESX 4.0 hosts. I was going to write up the steps I use but David Davis @davidmdavis of TrainSignal fame has written up a great step by step guide of how to do this if you’re not familiar.
Once this is done you will then need to upgrade the virtual machine hardware to version 7. Scott Lowe has done a brilliantly detailed posting of how to do this and the changes you need to make to allow you to use the latest networking capabilities. Now i know a bunch of you will think that you don’t need to update your esx hosts to the latest version to be able to upgrade virtual machine hardware but due partly I believe to the problems I was experiencing when I tried I got a very vague error of .Only once I had migrated the machine to the latest host would it let me upgrade the virtual hardware. My colleague Simon Phillips noticed this virtual hardware upgrade was a difference between machine that worked and ones that didn’t so credit is due to him on spotting this and finding Scott’s posting on how to upgrade the virtual hardware.

After these changes the machines all communicated without any problems and almost a week in haven’t shown any of the problems we were experiencing.

Funnily enough while building up this blog posting i came across a load of really interesting articles from fellow virtualisation professionals and i was going to do a wrap up of it all with the thoughts of putting your machine on standard or distributed switches and should you make it a virtual machine or not. But as of this morning Richard Brambley @rbrambley did a great one himself on the virtual centre side ,so definitely have a read. As well as these articles all surrounding the same topics and the problems and opinions some of the top people thought/have come across.

Sadly after finding out these solutions we’re now having to migrate all our machines back to standard switches due to our virtual centre server having database problems and needing a rebuild. I still think I would like to try use Distributed Virtual Switches again in the future but unless you have an enormous environment where you need the DVS’ I feel standard switches are more than adequate and at the moment less the pain.

Also a big thanks to Simon Phillips for all his help in this, Gabrie van Zanten for chatting through loads of it with me on gchat, all the guys on twitter who replied to me with ideas,the people who replied to my VMware communities question and the VMware helpdesk guy I caught unawares with all my questions when he called me about my virtual centre problems.

I’m always open for a chat/troubleshoot if you’re having the same problems so either leave a comment below or add me on twitter at @greggrobertson5.

Gregg Robertson

March 7, 2010
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

Dell Openmanage Installation

A few weeks ago I had to install OpenManage on some of my newer dell server machines and since some of the settings have changed since I last used it I thought I would write up a list of the steps required for our teams wiki site and write up a blog posting of the the steps for anyone who hasn’t done it before.So belatedly here are the steps and cool new tricks some of my friends on twitter showed me.

Firstly the standard steps:

Download the tar file from the ftp site or the support site
Copy the file using winscp(this is what i use at least) to /tmp/openmanage on the server
Log into the box either via winscp /via putty or onto the console directly and type in:

cd /tmp/openmanage
tar -zxvf OM_X.X.0_ManNode_A01.tar.gz (OM_6.2.0_ManNode_A00.tar currently)
Once the files have unpacked type in:
cd linux/supportscripts/
./srvadmin-install.sh -x (-x is for express install and installs everything but if you only want to install specific features the commands you can also use are -d -w -r –s )

-d = Dell Agent
-w = web interface
-r = DRAC services
-s = storage management
Once the files have unpacked and installed type:
srvadmin-services.sh start
When the various component services have finished starting type in:
cd /tmp
rm -rf Openmanage
To allow the Openmanage agent to function the following firewall commands need to be run, these open the firewall ports required:
esxcfg-firewall -o 1311,tcp,in,OpenManageRequest

While asking a few friends on twitter if the latest Openmanage worked well in their environments Arne Fokkema @afokkema of ict-freak-nl fame pointed to the automated scripting way of doing it written up by Scott Hanson @dellservergeek . As you may know if you’ve read some of my previous blog posting I’m trying to learn how to script more and more of my daily tasks to firstly build my powershell and scripting knowledge and skills as well as making my daily job easier. The script is really simple and is one I’m planning to test in my lab environment very soon. At the bottom of the script though was a comment by one of my powershell idols in Alan Renouf @alanrenouf. He had changed a few of the snmpd commands and so I got a hold of him via twitter and classic him he mailed me the script he spoke of. Only after this did I notice he wrote up a blog post about it,which is exactly what he sent me.

Thanks to all who replied to my twitter messages and hopefully I can get Alan/Scott’s scripts into my automated server deployments in the very near future.

Gregg Robertson

February 26, 2010
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

Enabling Telnet in Windows 7

This morning while trying to do some troubleshooting via one of my windows 7 testing machines I noticed that they have disabled telnet by standard as they did in vista it seems. I’m sure this is due to Microsoft trying to make windows 7 more secure. So I thought I would quickly post up how to re-enable it for anyone wishing to do this but isn’t fully up to speed with windows 7(although guess if you need telnet you should be already but anyhow)

Go to Start
Control Panel
Programs And Features
Turn Windows features on or off
Tick the box for Telnet Client
Then click the OK button and it will be installed for you.

Hope this helps someone 🙂

Gregg Robertson

February 25, 2010
by Gregg Robertson 2 Comments

MCSE upgrade to MCITP Server Administrator

This morning on twitter i saw Scott Lowe(@scott_lowe) and Jason Boche(@jasonboche) talking about the upgrading of their MCSE credentials to MCITP and though i would repost the blog postings I wrote on my Corporate blog and thought i would repost them here for people who are interested.

Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist(MCTS) 2008 (posted 05 August 2008)

As I’ve said in previous blog postings before, I have a bit of a problem, I love doing Microsoft exams. So feeding my addiction I was very happy to hear of the new windows 2008 exams that were coming out which I spoke of fairly extensively in a previous posting. My aim is still to get my mcitp credentials and along this path I needed to upgrade my MCSE 2003 to Server 2008 and this entailed me needing to write the exam 70-649 : Upgrading Your MCSE on Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008, Technology Specialist. So last Friday after many nights of studying, weekends spent inside going over material and the massive book the Conchango training department kindly got for me to use called The Real MCTS/MCITP Exam 70-649 Prep Kit: Independent and Complete Self-Paced Solutions which I would highly highly recommend ,I wrote the exam.

I did the upgrade exams from MCSE 2000 to MCSE 2003 so was very weary of this exam as like many other people I know and have spoken to who have done or attempted the 2000 to 2003 exams the two exams were a nightmare and a true challenge of your knowledge. But I have to admit that this exam thankfully wasn’t as insane as those previous upgrade exams and was fairly straight forward in the answering. Now obviously I am not going to divulge any information of the exam as I don’t need Microsoft bringing a lawsuit on me for breaking the rules of the exams, but as I said earlier the book I used was spot on in covering absolutely every bit of information I needed to prepare me for the exam and my test score of 962 is definitely as testament to that(especially because I know the question I got wrong that denied me my full number of points).

So now I am a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist in three different fields after passing my exam which definitely makes my Transcript look pretty mean if I do say so myself with the new four credentials being:

Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist

Windows Server 2008 Active Directory: Configuration

Windows Server 2008 Applications Infrastructure: Configuration

Windows Server 2008 Network Infrastructure: Configuration

Now I jusAt need to do my 70-646 for my MCITP:server administrator credential

MCITP Server Administrator (posted 02 April 2009)

On the 19th of march i finally got myself into gear and wrote my second mcse upgrade exam to server 2008 exam 070-646. With the passing of this exam i also acquired the new certification MCITP Server Administrator.

As stated in previous blog postings i did the upgrade exams for the upgrading of my MCSE 2000 to 2003 and the exams were very challenging, so much so i actually failed one at my first attempt. Sadly both of the upgrade exams for server 2008 were much much easier in comparison. I can possibly attribute some of that to my using of the technology far more than i did for 2003 when i wrote the upgrade exam but they were definitely made a lot easier and most of the answers i felt could have been guessed by someone just based on the answer being the new technology in 2008.

So now i am now an MCITP: Server Administrator

I’m still a bit puzzled why they took away the well known MCSE certification but they claim these new certifications prove your skills more effectively on specific technologies. I still feel the MCSE covered a much broader base which proved your skills much better whereas this new way waters down the exams and doesn’t prove a candidates skills as well. Mark Wilson explains this in a lot more and better detail in one of his blog postings.

I waited to post this blog till my confirmation finally came through and showed in my transcript which happened last night as now i have the MCITP exam at the top of my transcript(which has extended quite nicely with the mcts credentials i obtained from my 70-649 exam)

If anyone is planning to write this exam wants a good book to study for the exam i would firmly recommend the MCITP Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-646): Windows Server Administration http://www.amazon.com/MCITP-Self-Paced-Training-Exam-70-646/dp/0735625107. It covered all the topics very well and is a third off so well worth the buy.

Good luck to anyone writing this exam and hope the above rambling helps you in some way. Now i need to decide if i do my Hyper-V exam or do the exam for me to acquire the MCITP: Enterprise administrator credential.(Funnily enough i did neither and still haven’t. I started my VMware path but I plan to write and blog about my upgrading to MCITP Enterprise Administrator later this year)

Gregg Robertson

February 24, 2010
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

Location of sysprep files on a Windows 2008 vCentre server.

I recently installed/migrated my virtual centre server to a Windows 2008 server and came across the problem of losing my sysprep files for the usage of configuration wizard as I posted about on my corporate blog quite a while back now (pre any kind of VMware training in my defence). Thankfully Simon Gallagher (@vinf_net) posted about the exact problem I was having this week and has saved me having to fiddle around and look for the solution. I know not the biggest of problems you could face but when you’re deploying the amount of machines I have recently, having to run sysprep on each of them once they are built is a step I’d like to skip.Hope it saves someone else the time like it has for me =0)

Gregg Robertson

Technorati Tags: VMware,sysprep,windows server 2008,cutomisation wizard

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February 18, 2010
by Gregg Robertson 2 Comments

All things Virtual V

The past few weeks have been very busy both personally and in the virtualisation arena. My previous posting on the DNS issues I came across and my still unanswered problem with Virtual Distributed Switching VLAN connectivity(which I will post a blog about when I find a solution better than the long winded work around I detailed in my discussion) while deploying a large number of projects both here in the UK as well as in the US has kept me very busy. As for the virtualisation side there has been a large amount of interesting articles,more employment movements by some of the top people in virtualisation and a very nice bit of coverage of this blog.

Unfortunately even though I work for one of the major VMware partners I wasn’t fortunate enough to make it to the VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas last week. Sadly I didn’t see a large amount of new and interesting news coming out of this either,but the blogs I found very interesting and which covered the events was blogs Duncan Epping(@duncanyb) of Yellow Bricks fame’s blog on the event detailed. From these blogs the points that really interested me were:

VMware’s recently acquired company Zimbra. I would firmly recommend reading up on what Zimbra is and what it does as I have a very strong feeling we’ll be hearing plenty about it in the coming weeks and months.A very interesting acquisition which I’m sure is one they have done to increase their clout in the Cloud Computing arena.
The news and painful lack of definite news on the decommissioning of the service console was of upmost interest to me obviously as we have a large array of esx machines here in my environment that are all using the service console. I’ve still not read any really good reasons for this happening apart from someone at VMware thinking it would be fun to make VMware Systems Administrators have cold sweats at the the threat of it coming in soon and the work that will need to be done as well as the skills that will need to be learnt for this to happen. From chatting to a few fellow virtualisation sys admin’s there is a lot of dissatisfaction with this decision and the reasoning of “minimize the possible attack surface”. This is complete rubbish to me as the trade off of ease of configuration and management compared to the possibility of your systems being attacked is massively painful as with correct security procedures there shouldn’t be any real chance of this happening so why take it away and make my job that much more difficult and complex. Hopefully someone will be able to answer this with better reasoning.Scott Lowe’s first session’s blog comments have detailed part of this and is where my disappointment in the still lack of news is detailed by a few people.
The next part that i did find interesting due to my plans to utilise the software for my works own environment was the talk about VMware Chargeback. Scott Lowe’s blog about this session was the one i got the most out of on the topic and is one I’m currently using as a resource for my roll out of the appliance. Hopefully if all goes well I can post my findings and opinions of what it does and how it has or hasn’t helped me.
If you want a really good overview of the day Chad Sakac of virtual geek fame has posted a very in depth and detailed posting on the event and is a blog i would recommend if you have the time to read(I’m currently still making my way through it)

This week Monday Nicholas Weaver (@lynxbat) posted his latest update to the much tweeted about and highly spoke of vSphere Mini Monitor. I have personally installed the tool and am busy configuring it to suit my needs. It’s a brilliant tool for anyone wishing to monitor their virtual environment in new practical ways(twitter feed especially). Also a big welcome to Nick on his joining EMC. Seems the tide of top virtualisation people joining EMC is carrying on. Nick’s posting on his leaving and his reasons for leaving are something I can relate to as is his desire to constantly learn and push himself and is what I did when I left my then gf,parents,lifestyle and comfy job back in South Africa to move over to the UK just so that I could push myself and become better and hopefully end up working with some of the industry leaders(which I’m very proud to say I am now that I work at EMC and previously Conchango)

After much waiting (almost three months) my VCP4 certificate finally arrived this past week and with it my workstation 7 licence key. The licence is very helpful as I use workstation 7 for a lot of my home testing/workshop testing and work. Eric Sloof(@esloof) posted about the kits being sent out and as well as the new vcp logo which I have now attached to my signature at the bottom to keep in accordance.

In the past two weeks one of my team members and I have now been tasked with the backing up of our virtual machines and so i needed to brush up my knowledge on vcb backups. While asking an open question on this David Convery(@dconvery) pointed me to a blog posting he did detailing a document he wrote all about vcb and how it works and how to deploy it. It’s a brilliant document and one I have saved and have been using to manage our vcb backup environment.

As I have detailed in previous blog postings my aim this year to try better my skills in Powershell so that I can make my life easier in managing my companies virtualised environment. One of the leaders in this field in using powershell for VMware tasks is Alan Renouf(@alanrenouf). Last Monday he posted a brilliant article detailing automated vm provisioning. I have yet to try these scripts out but if these do what they say they can do and are anything like his vcheck tool then I can’t wait to get them to make my daily job easier.

Simon Seagrave from techhead.co.uk posted about the ability to Pre-register now to be notified when you will be able to register for VMworld2010 (i had to read that twice myself to make sure it made sense) I’m planning on going to the European one this year, which I’m extremely excited for for so many obvious reasons!!

While busy working this past week I decided to catch up on all the VMTN podcasts I hadn’t listened to yet as I like to keep up to date on everything happening and unfortunately with the amount of new and information coming out all the time the only time I can listen to these things is while I’m at work. The last one had Mike Laverick of RTFM-ED fame and Stevie Chambers from the UCS team and of viewyonder.com fame. The podcast was extremely interesting to me and I found myself sitting still at points to concentrate on the things the podcast was covering. The podcasts are very informative and I would highly recommend them to anyone wanting to learn and keep up to date with everything happening and due to happen in the virtualisation field.

As I said in my previous All Things Virtual posting the London/South England VMUG is happening next week Thursday. Sadly I’m not able to attend as I stated in the posting which was made even more painful this week when I heard it’s fully booked before my co-workers had registered so now none of us are going and that so many of the top british virtualisation industry leaders are attending. I’ll definitely be glued to twitter during the day and Simon Long of SLOG fame has promised me a detailed blog about the days proceedings.

Gregg Robertson

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