Month: April 2012

Install Trusted SSL Certificate in Cisco UCS Manager

One of the tasks you should complete during the installation of the Cisco UCS Manager is configuring the Fabric Interconnects with a trusted SSL certificate. The procedure is straight forward, and only needs to be completed once, since the two Fabric Interconnects are clustered and the configuration is replicated between...

Cisco UCS Microsoft SCOM 2012 Management Pack

For those of you using Cisco UCS servers and the new Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager 2012, check out the UCS Management Pack v2.5. You can download it from here. According to the release notes the following operating systems are supported:Windows Vista Windows Server 2008Windows Server 2008 R2Windows 7What's new...

Cicso UCS Platform Emulator Updated

If you are a Cisco UCS customer and want to experiment with configurations but don't want to mess up your production environment, Cisco offers the free UCS Platform Emulator VM. They regularly update the emulator, and their most current version is v2.0.94849.368934. You can download the emulator here. You can...

Free Veeam VMware Management Pack for MS System Center 2012

For those of you that don't already have a good monitoring solution for your VMware infrastructure, and use MS Operations Manager, you need to check out the Veeam Management Pack. It's a good solution for single pane monitoring of your MS and VMware infrastructure. They are currently running a special...

HP Insight Management 7.0 Features

Ever since I can remember Compaq/HP has offered their Insight Manager. Hot off the presses is their new 7.0 version which sports some major upgrades. You can download the multi-gigabyte ISO images here for free. Even if you don't use Insight Manager, you might be very interested in their totally...

vSphere 5.0 Hardening Guide Draft Release

A few days ago VMware released a public draft of the vSphere 5.0 Hardening Guide. Unlike the vSphere 4.0 Hardening Guide that I've talked about before, this version only comes in an Excel Spreadsheet form. Personally, I think the PDF format of the 4.0 Guide is easier to read, but...

vSphere Web Client Service Stops

One of the new features added to vSphere 5.0 is a web client. The web client is a slimmed down version of the vSphere client that you can access from a browser. It doesn't have 100% of the features of the fat vSphere client, but it's a great way to...

vSphere Host Compliance Failures: Fault Tolerance not supported

During a recent vSphere 5.0 cluster setup, in which I had no need for Fault Tolerance, I kept getting a profile compliance failure for the cluster. The compliance errors were:Fault Tolerance is not support on this host. Reason:Fault Tolerance is not support on this host. Reason: FT logging is not enabled...

I’m a VMware vExpert for 2012!

Quite unexpectedly tonight I got an email from VMware telling me that I've been designated a VMware vExpert 2012. According to the welcome e-mail:You’ve done work above and beyond, helping others succeed with VMware, and we here in the Social Media and Communities team are delighted to welcome you to...

Creating Cisco UCS Customized vSphere 5.0 U1 Bootable ISO

UPDATE 2 5/15/2012: Looks like VMware/Cisco pulled the 5.0 U1 custom ISO installation media. So follow my blog post below to create your own. UPDATE 1 4/23/12: Cisco released a customized vSphere 5.0 U1 installation ISO with all of their latest drivers. You can download it here under OEM Customized Installer...

Integrate Cisco UCS Drivers into Windows install media

If you are a Cisco UCS customer and want to install Windows on a physical server, you will quickly realize not all of the needed drivers are baked into Windows. While Cisco does provide small ISO files for various drivers you can mount during the installation process, it requires manual...