Life

Ran into another weird problem the other day … Had a few Windows boxens running out of space. Why ? Well, because TSM includes a System-State backup when creating the daily incremental. Now, apparently (as stated by the IBM support) it isn’t TSM’s job to keep track of the VSS snapshots but rather Windows’. Now by default, if you don’t click on the VSS properties of a Windows drive, there is no limit on the volume. Thus, VSS is slowly eating up all your space. ...

I’ve been meaning to post this, but never actually got around to doing that. When installing vCenter 5.0, an instance of ADAM is installed, which stores all the configration data for Linked Mode. It basically boils down to running this script and rebooting the box: 1 2 reg DELETE "HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetservicesADAM_VMwareVCMSDSParameters" /v "Port SSL" /f reg ADD "HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetservicesADAM_VMwareVCMSDSParameters" /v "Port SSL" /t REG_DWORD /d 0000027c /f This is no new invention of myself, just writing it down for myself from here or here.

Since the Scheduled Tasks in vCenter ain’t exportable, I went ahead and wrote a rather simple script, which lets me do this in Windows own Task Scheduler. What this script does, is initiate a graceful shutdown and if the VM isn’t shutdown within 60 seconds (12 * 5 seconds) it simply powers the VM off and immediately after that powers it back on. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 param( [string] $vCenter, [string] $VMname ) # Add the VI-Snapin if it isn't loaded already if ( (Get-PSSnapin -Name "VMware.VimAutomation.Core" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null ) { Add-PSSnapin -Name "VMware.VimAutomation.Core" } If ( !($vCenter) -or !($VMname) ) { Write-Host Write-Host "vm-reboot: <vcenter-server> <VMname>" Write-Host Write-Host " <vcenter-server> - DNS name of your vCenter server." Write-Host " <VMname> - Display name of the VM in this vCenter server." Write-Host exit 1 } Connect-VIServer -Server $vCenter $VM = Get-VM $VMname # First, try shutting down the virtual machine gracefully Write-Host "Stopping VM $( $VM )" Write-Host " - Graceful shutdown" Shutdown-VMGuest -VM $VM -Confirm:$false $VM = Get-VM $VMname $i = 0 While ($VM.PowerState -ne "PoweredOff") { # If that doesn't work, break out the hammer and just kill it if ( $i -gt 12 ) { Write-Host " - Forced shutdown" Stop-VM -VM $VMname -Confirm:$false } Start-Sleep -Seconds 5 $VM = Get-VM $VMname $i++ } If ($VM.PowerState -eq "PoweredOff") { Write-Host "Starting VM $( $VM )" Start-VM -VM $VM -Confirm:$false >$NULL } Disconnect-VIServer -server $vCenter -Confirm:$false Before this implementation in PowerCLI, I needed three tasks for each VM that was to be scheduled. And when migrating vCenters (and I usually do an empty install) vCenter’s scheduled tasks are not exportable, thus you need to re-create the tasks on the new vCenter by yourself again, which for more than four virtual machines is really a pain in the ass … ...

We recently had, after we migrated from vSphere 4 to vSphere 5, a memory limit in size of the configured memory on each and every VM. Since memory limits on VM level pretty much destroy performance, I went ahead an wrote this simple script to remove all memory limits on all VMs that don’t have “Unlimited” configured: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 param( [string] $vCenter ) # Add the VI-Snapin if it isn't loaded already if ( (Get-PSSnapin -Name "VMware.VimAutomation.Core" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null ) { Add-PSSnapin -Name "VMware.VimAutomation.Core" } If ( !($vCenter) ) { Write-Host Write-Host "cluster-remove-mem-limits: <vcenter-server>" Write-Host Write-Host " <vcenter-server> - DNS name of your vCenter server." Write-Host exit 1 } Connect-VIServer -Server $vCenter Get-VM | Get-VMResourceConfiguration | Where-Object { $_.memlimitmb -ne '-1' } |` Set-VMResourceConfiguration -memlimitmb $null Disconnect-VIServer -server $vCenter -Confirm:$false This script is basically what the guy over at get-admin.com did, just only for memory limits.

Well, it’s been a while since I last blogged about anything. I’ve been real busy with work with the move from vSphere 4 to vSphere 5 (well planning takes a while …), reorganizing our vSphere Clusters/Farms, a lot of PowerCLI voodoo (some of it, I’m gonna post), the usual Windows honky-donky (Windows group policy for certain stuff). Besides that, you know, I have some kind of personal life. That basically took all of my free time. So I’m gonna try to write some posts up in the next few weeks, with some PowerCLI scripts mostly, some Shell scripts for SVC-automation, as well as some NetApp foo, guess we’ll see.

Well it took me exactly two full Windows reinstallations till I figured that one out, thanks to Google. Basically the Creative Suite 3 installs an mDNSresponder as system service (named " ##Id_String2.6844F930_1628_4223_B5CC_5BB94B879762##" -- don't ask me why the cryptic name), which basically screws up your Windows! It lays another physical network on top of the current one and once you reboot the system you’re gonna sit there and try and figure out, why the fuck you ain’t getting a DHCP address on boot. And since a simple deactivate/activate of the nic fixes it 🤷 ...

Today I had to install PowerCLI on my workstation. When I tried launching it for the first time, it simply opened and closed again instantly. After browsing the VMware community for this error and not finding a useful solution, I ended up googling the error. As it turns out, this only happens when you did set the " Number of recent items to display in jump lists" to something less than 4. ...

I recently reinstalled the vCenter Server at work, and in my never ending wisdom cough, I decided to do that on new hardware. That entitled using the same host name plus the appendix _NEW. Now, I know this isn’t conforming with DNS naming schemes (iirc underscore isn’t a valid DNS char), however it worked … So once I had everything installed on the new hardware, I switched the ESX servers from the old vCenter to the freshly installed one. Once that was finished, I shut down the old vCenter server, changed IP address and host name of the new one and rebooted. That basically worked, even though suddenly every ESX in my inventory was disconnected. After reconnecting all ESX servers everything was back online. ...

Some of you out there may know, I am using Ember MM to scrape my movies and TV episodes. One thing about that is, that Ember MM is kinda stupid doing so. After the 9.10-release of XMBC, they apparently changed the XML format, introducting durationinseconds, which is basically like duration, just … yeah you guessed right, in seconds. Now Ember MM doesn’t know that, and still writes the old duration-tag. Now, everytime when something goes kaboom! with my library, I do have to rescrape all my episodes and movies, which isn’t a big deal since the NFO’s are still on disk. However, since I didn’t watch them (as Ember doesn’t know about the lastplayed-tag) XBMC is not showing any runtime in the GUI. Now this isn’t annoying per se, but it was just bugging me (and since I got lots of spare time, due to being chained to the sofa). ...

We recently received a shipment of Hewlett Packards all-new DL580 G7. While I’m impressed with what they did with the iLO3, I’m quite disappointed with what they did to the PXE-ROM. Sure, gPXE may be the future and is offering more possibilites than “normal” PXE, however breaking customers deployment option(s) – at least for Windows that is – really wouldn’t be an option. Now for the long story, we needed to install a temporary Windows on this DL580 (one with testing purposes). That said, we tried for three days to actually make this work (trying different things with the boot image), but it kept ending with the same result. ...