What seems like a lifetime ago, but is in fact only about 3 years ago, I worked at a small Sydney integrator called ENSTOR. ENSTOR went to the wall but this is neither here nor there – what matters is that I worked with two wholly remarkable an unique women. One is Siobhan Ellis, the [...]
Posts from ‘June, 2009’
Powershell: another Dusan Solution(tm) for VCB
The university where I contract, has a solution whereby their VCB policies are based on datastores in which the machines are residing in. ie Netbackup will have a policy that calls a VCB script to snapshot all VMs in a datastore. Except, there’s a small problem – how do you size the holding tank for [...]
Quick heads up re. vShield: RTFM
So… I got bitten by not reading the manual, or in this case – the admin guide for vShield. See, enabling vShield makes all VMs communicate via the internalised network – vShield will actually inform you of an error during a migration. The error states that the VM is attached to a virtual intranet. This [...]
Powershell VI3 charge-back scripts
A colleague of mine – Dusan from DMTECH has created two powershell scripts that allow charge-back accounting on an ESX farm that is used to host customer data: Assuming a CSV file like this: Name,Business Owner,Chargeable,Commence Date,Cost (Upfront),Cost (Yearly) Dept1PWAP003,Bob Marley,Y,,"$2,722.41",$815.00 Dept1PWAP004,Bob Marley,Y,,"$1,707.96",$476.85 Dept1PWAP005,Bob Marley,Y,,"$2,722.41",$815.00 Dept1PWAP006,Bob Marley,Y,,"$2,722.41",$815.00 Dept1PWAP007,Bob Marley,Y,,"$2,722.41",$815.00 Dept1PWAP008,Bob Marley,Y,,"$5,199.25","$1,310.37" Dept1PWAP009,Bob Marley,Y,,"$2,722.41",$815.00 Dept1TWAA010,Bob Marley,Y,,"$1,231.27",$381.51 [...]
EMC Storage Viewer Update – v1.1
EMC have released Storage Viewer 1.1 which now supports Virtual Infrastructure Client 2.5 update 4. The objective of the EMC® Storage Viewer for Virtual Infrastructure Client is to provide a new tool that facilitates discovery and identification of EMC storage devices which are allocated to VMware ESX servers and virtual machines. This brings the storage [...]
Migrating Ubuntu Servers
Update: thanks to Charles (in comments) for reminding me about the extra MAC space VMware uses Ever cold-migrated a Ubuntu VM or de-registered it, then re-registered it on another host? You’ll know that what happens is that Ubuntu immediately loses network access because the underlying MAC has changed. The way ESX generates MACs is based [...]
A real pain in the arse: CDP in ESX 3.5/4.0
So, everyone loves CDP? Hands up if yes? Well… that’s everybody. I love CDP too – when VMware implement it correctly. See, here’s the thing – CDP will not work with Intel NICs of a certain type (Intel MT and PT dualport NICs – and some quad ports) if the port they are attached to [...]