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Well, I recently (last Wednesday) had a lot of trouble with Update Manager. First I thought, upgrading vCenter and modules to 5.0U1 would solve my troubles, however it did not. Update Manager was still complaining about something. Since neither in the vCenter Update Manager nor the vCenter log itself were having any useful information I enabled SSHd and the ESXi Shell via the vCenter client: SSH’ed into the ESX host and looked at /var/log/esxupdate.log, and found this particular log: ...

Well, I finally switched back to the official builds of XBMC (well, semi-official). Now, since my previous and my current media center doesn’t come with a remote like, say a Boxee box, I built myself a custom one using a Hama MCE Remote Control and a Logitech Harmony 300. After trying a bunch of things (it actually works like a standard mouse), I stumbled upon this Trac ticket. ...

I recently bought a replacement for my aging Acer Revo R1600. I decided to go with the HD-ID34, since I didn’t wanna fiddle with buying a bunch of components. Installed a copy of Windows 7 on it (just to try it out …. 😛), and downloaded the Ubuntu 11.10 mini.iso. However the mini.iso apparently has issues (no clue which), basically it boots but gets stuck when bringing up the network connectivity (which is fucked up, since the mini.iso needs network connectivity to contiune the installation). ...

Well, I recently stumbled upon another cute bug/feature with Windows Deployment Services. When you already have 32bit boot images (as we do) and then add an 64bit boot image (which we needed, since the drivers for UCS firmware v2.0 only support Windows Server 2008 R2) you still only see the 32bit images. Why ? Because apparently the client (in my case a UCS blade) isn’t reporting it’s architecture correctly in the PXE phase. Microsoft actually has a KB article for this. You only need to enable architecture discovery. ...

Well, I found a bunch of PDF documents on my disk today, which I wanted converted to JPEG. Now, Debian replaced ImageMagick in the past for GraphicsMagick, which is supposedly a bit faster and leaner than ImageMagick. So first you need to install graphicsmagick – or rewrite the script to use /usr/bin/convert instead. The script basically takes every .PDF you have in your current working directory, creates a sub-directory, and then extracts each page of the PDF into a single JPEG image in that subdirectory. ...

Well, once again the Microsoft Cluster on VMware bit my ass … As you might know, MSCS on VMware is a particular kind of pain, with each upgrade you end up with the same problem over and over again (SCSI reservations on the RDM-LUNs being one, and the passive node not booting being the other). So I opened up another support case with VMware, and the responded like this: Please see this kb entry: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1016106 ...

I recently started reinstalling all my ESX hosts, so I wrote up a short script that is reconfiguring all hosts and sets the NTP configuration according to my wish: 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 param( [string] $vcenter, [string] $ntpserver1, [string] $ntpserver2 ) # 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 !($ntpserver1) -or !($ntpserver2) ) { Write-Host `n "vcenter-ntp-reconfigure: <vcenter-server> <ntpserver1> <ntpserver2>" `n Write-Host "This script clears the NTP servers currently configured and" `n Write-Hsot "adds the ones supplied on the command line." `n Write-Host " <vcenter-server> - DNS name of your vCenter server." `n Write-Host " <ntpserver1> - NTP server #1" `n Write-Host " <ntpserver2> - NTP server #2" `n exit 1 } Connect-VIServer -Server $vcenter foreach ($esxhost in Get-VMHost) { Get-VMHost $esxhost | Remove-VMHostNtpServer -Confirm:$false -NtpServer (Get-VMHost $esxhost | ` Get-VMHostNtpServer) Get-VMHost $esxhost | Add-VMHostNtpServer -NtpServer $ntpserver1 Get-VMHost $esxhost | Add-VMHostNtpServer -NtpServer $ntpserver2 } Disconnect-VIServer -server $vcenter -Confirm:$false As you can see, the script takes the vCenter hostname and two NTP servers and basically applies it to each host in your vCenter environment.

As we’re finally at the point, where I only need to bother with HP hardware (which in itself is troublesome enough), I wanted to use HPs vibdeposit with our Update Manager. The whole purpose of the repository is the integration of HPs custom vibs (download able on each hardware under VMware ESXi 5.0) into the VMware Update Manager. That makes it easy to integrate, say the nmi-sourcing driver, into the VMware built ESXi images. ...

Well, once again I hacked at the Powershell/PowerCLI the other day. Since we don’t yet have a Enterprise Plus license at work (which would support Datastore Maintaince and Storage DRS), I needed a way to empty one datastore and move all the content into another one, while enabling Thin-Provisioning. So I googled for a bit, and actually found a few hints … So without further yada-yada, here’s the script I came up with: ...

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. ...