Windows Server 2008 sluggish mouse in VMware

 Install the following for the display driver:


C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\Drivers\wddm_video

Switch / Disk Array serial connections

For console access to your switches & disk arrays, connect the serial cable up to a physical Windows server, then RDP to that server, then use PuTTY for the serial connection

VMware Cold Clone

The vmware COLD converter CD is only included with the Enterprise level version.

Latest version is 3. If you don’t have this, there are other options available from PlateSpin, for example.

Before P2V’ing with the COLDCLONE CD, remove the static IP address i.e. set to DHCP in the OS. This makes it easier to re-assign that IP once the P2V has completed. If you don’t, then that IP will still be assigned to a non existing NIC and you will have to delete stuff via Device Manager, which while not a problem, there's no need if you'd removed the IP first.

Upgrading from VMware ESX 3.5.0 v123630 to ESX 4.1.0 v348481

NOTE: you have to go via ESX 4.0.0 398348 – you cannot go directly to 4.1


NOTE: with new software comes new hardware requirements. Are your servers on the vSphere supported list?

First, upgrade vCenter Server to v345043 (perhaps take a snapshot or VDR of it first)

(afterwards, this upgrade might not allow your current vm hosts to connect to the vsphere vcenter, but you can still connect to them directly. This is not a problem as we’re about to upgrade the hosts anyway)

SSH to the ESX host you want to upgrade, to check the amount of disk space.

Use df -h

By default, ESX does not let you SSH to the shell as ROOT, so create another user (admin), give it a password and permissions equivalent to root.

You get the option to create another user on install, or if you didn’t do this, use the vSphere client to connect directly to the ESX host and use Users & Groups to create your admin user.

Once logged into the shell (using your admin account), type

su – root

to connect as ROOT.

We used the following versions / files to upgrade:

“ESX-4.0.0-update03-398348.iso” with Host Update Utility 4, Build 385281

(this is to upgrade from ESX 3.5.0 v123630 to ESX 4.0.0 v398348)

Then copy the “upgrade-from-esx4.0-to-4.1-update01-348481.zip” to the local datastore of the ESX or ESXi host you want to upgrade and run the zip file.

(log in to the shell as admin, via SSH)

It does hang for a while at certain percentages, but you can always check what the server is upto via your RAC. Which hopefully is configured. I've found that Firefox seems to be the best browser for handling the Java screen, it seems to work much more consistently than IE, or Chrome.

Dell switches and Cisco switches

First off, Dell switches are compatible with Cisco switches, but due to Dell (and other vendors) choosing to follow the 802.1q standard in a different way to Cisco (they choose to allow only tagged traffic on the native VLAN, while Cisco ignores traffic for their native VLAN), this can lead to problems if you use the default VLAN(1) for management. Using the default VLAN(1) for management was something I inherited and would not recommend. I think VMware's not too keen on it either, from what I remember during installs.

In order to get the switches working together, we need to configure the Dell port-channel as a trunk, thus only allowing tagged traffic and ignoring untagged traffic.

To force the Cisco switch to send/receive VLAN1 traffic as tagged traffic you locally configure another native VLAN on the trunk-interface of the Cisco switch. On the interface, configure an unused VLAN as the local native VLAN.

Further info can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.1Q)

& here: http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/download/802.1Q-2005.pdf

TheGreenButton.tv

Since Microsoft took over TGB and merged it into the WEC (Windows Experts Community) its become a PITA, in all honesty.

Some old TGB members have started up www.thegreenbutton.tv in a bid to get the old feeling back to the forum.

Excellent!

Where's that email address?

Go to ADUC, choose Find > Custom Search > click the advanced tab where you can type in a LDAP query, type proxyAddresses=smtp:sales@yourdomain.com.

Remote Potato

I can't recommend this highly enough; it's the missing part of Windows Media Centre:

http://www.remotepotato.com/

Where are my FSMOs?

The quickest way to find out where they're hiding is (after you've installed Support Tools):

netdom query fsmo

The best Remote Desktop switch

If you're ever in the position where a server's 2 remote desktop sessions are locked and tsadmin isn't doing it's job (maybe the server isn't part of the domain), the the only choice is:

mstsc /v:servername /admin


Effectively, this simulates you actually being at the server, where you can kill the sessions.