Month: April 2010

Isolate your HP BladeSystem Management traffic with VLANs

A few weeks ago HP released a major update to their onboard administrator, the brains behind the HP C-Class chassis. Previously all of the iLOs (lights-out remote management processor) and all of the interconnect modules needed to be on the same VLAN. If a single chassis had both test/dev and...

HP BladeSystem Technical Resources

HP really makes it hard to find all of the relevant documentation for their various products. But tonight I stumbled upon a link for all of their BladeSystem documentation. It has quick specs, customer advisories, support docs, quick install docs, and user guides. A cornucopia of documentation for geeky people!It...

New Nexus 1000v Release Notes and updated VEM

A few weeks ago Cisco revised their release notes for the Nexus 1000v 4.0(4)SV1(2) version. This is not a new version of the 1000v VSM appliance, just updated documentation. The updates clarify limitations with vMotion, VMware Lab Manager, ACL limitations, and NetFlow limitations. You can check out the new release...

HP Insight Control Software Updates

For those HP customers that are using the wide variety of Insight Control products, HP and recently released updates in March and April of this year. Updates include:Insight Control Server Deployment 6.1 that includes Altiris 6.9 SP4 (April 2010)HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM) 6.0 (March 2010)HP Insight Control for Microsoft...

vSphere, HP Flex-10/Virtual Connect, and Cisco Nexus resources

I'm smack dab in the middle of designing a robust deployment of VMware vSphere using HP C-class blade chassis, HP Flex-10/Virtual Connect modules, and Cisco Nexus hardware and virtual switches (5000 and 1000v, respectively). This is a pretty forward leaning architecture and fairly complicated. After plowing through a ton of...

New VMware Certifications announced!

I'm pretty excited about the newly announced VMware exams. VMware had a big gap between their VCP entry level certification at the mother of all daddy certifications, the VCDX. The two new exams are:VMware Certified Advanced Professional - Enterprise AdminVMware Certified Advanced Professional - DesignHaving a VCP 4.0 is required...

New HP Server Firmware Update CD

Normally I wouldn't blog about a minor rev in a vendor's firmware update CD. But last week HP released a major version, with significant changes, to their Proliant firmware update CD. They've combined several of their blade offline update CDs into a single DVD that covers their ML, DL plus...

Final vSphere Hardening Guide Released

After a few months the highly anticipated vSphere 4.0 hardening guides have been released. Several months ago VMware released beta versions which I thought were pretty good. Seeing as DISA doesn't have STIGs for vSphere, the next best thing is vendor provided documentation.You can see the full release here and...

Server 2008 R2 Read-Only disks in ESX Templates

During the build process of my Windows Server 2008 R2 VM templates, I had perplexing problem with my second virtual disk after sysprep completed. In my previous blog post I showed a PowerShell command that reassigned a drive letter. Worked great, but a noticed a problem. My "D" drive, which...

Change a volume drive letter with Powershell

I ran across a useful command that instantly reassigns a drive to another letter, and another one liner that detects a CD-ROM and assigns it a particular letter. For additional details and a richer script, check out this blog post from The Admin Guy. The piece that I found most...

vCenter 4.0 SQL Database tweaks

VMware just released a killer whitepaper on how to optmize SQL 2008 performance for vCenter 4.0. It has quite a few details that I was not aware of and will result in changes to my production environment. Tips that were new to me included:- Optimizing the clustered index fill factor-...