So last evening I downloaded the newest version of VC 2.5 U2 so that I can take advantage of all the new features in ESX 3.5U2. All and all the upgrade went well however it does agitate me that during the upgrade of the VC I must manually fix the Virtual Center service by hand.
To get domain authentication the VMware Virtual Center Server service runs as a domain account which allows it to talk to our AD for permissions etc. However when the upgrade happens it resets this service to local system, then proceeds to hang at starting service till I go into services.msc and change it back to the domain account and start the service by hand.
I mean come on how hard would it be to either A) keep the current service credentials or B) ask for a service account or run as local system during the install.
Other than that gripe I think this is a great product update, allowing for hot cloning is huge for us as we're never allowed to take anything down outside of the second Saturday of every month. No fun as I don't want to work the weekend.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Monday, July 28, 2008
Happy Qlogic iSCSI Day!
As I mentioned one of the functions of my job is to maintain, upgrade and envision our virtualization environment aka VMware ESX 3.5 Server.
Well we recently did quite the face lift to our environment in our PDX datacenter. We upgraded to all diskless Dell PowerEdge 2950 Mark III servers. We boot from a new Equallogic iSCSI SAN using Qlogic QLE4062C iSCSI HBAs.
A problem with this that I discovered at time of implementation is that I could not boot from iSCSI if I enabled Jumbo Frames on the Qlogic HBA. The system would just hang at Qlogic BIOS searching for a bootable LUN. Workaround at the time was not to use Jumbo Frames, while this works performance does take a hit. Given that instead of getting a 9000 byte datagram the server is forced to chop it into 1500 byte datagrams.
Well in doing my normal browsing today I figured well it's been about 4 months since I last looked to see if this has been address and low and behold it has. The firmware for the QLE4062C that works is:
FW: 3.0.1.49
BIOS: 1.14
The process is fairly easy hit the Qlogic website go to Support > Downloads. Look up Linux 32bit FW for the QLE4062C. Download both zip files and extract to a single folder and then burn to a CD. Wasteful I know but the PE2950s don't have floppy drives won't boot from USB floppy either so what are you gonna do.
I boot from a simple Dos boot CD swap in my FW/BIOS CD and then run the following:
iflash /fb - Flashes the BIOS
iflash /ff - Flashes the Firmware
That's all there is to it. Enjoy Jumbo Frames support in an ESX 3.5 environment.
Well we recently did quite the face lift to our environment in our PDX datacenter. We upgraded to all diskless Dell PowerEdge 2950 Mark III servers. We boot from a new Equallogic iSCSI SAN using Qlogic QLE4062C iSCSI HBAs.
A problem with this that I discovered at time of implementation is that I could not boot from iSCSI if I enabled Jumbo Frames on the Qlogic HBA. The system would just hang at Qlogic BIOS searching for a bootable LUN. Workaround at the time was not to use Jumbo Frames, while this works performance does take a hit. Given that instead of getting a 9000 byte datagram the server is forced to chop it into 1500 byte datagrams.
Well in doing my normal browsing today I figured well it's been about 4 months since I last looked to see if this has been address and low and behold it has. The firmware for the QLE4062C that works is:
FW: 3.0.1.49
BIOS: 1.14
The process is fairly easy hit the Qlogic website go to Support > Downloads. Look up Linux 32bit FW for the QLE4062C. Download both zip files and extract to a single folder and then burn to a CD. Wasteful I know but the PE2950s don't have floppy drives won't boot from USB floppy either so what are you gonna do.
I boot from a simple Dos boot CD swap in my FW/BIOS CD and then run the following:
iflash /fb - Flashes the BIOS
iflash /ff - Flashes the Firmware
That's all there is to it. Enjoy Jumbo Frames support in an ESX 3.5 environment.
Post UNO
So I've decided to start blogging. For those of you that know me you probably guessed by the title it will be job related. For those that don't here's a synopsis for what I do.
Title: Sr. Infrastructure Administrator (for now we're in a merger could change who knows)
Job Functions: EVERYTHING! more specifically:
MS Windows Server 2k - 2k8
MS Exchange 2k3 - 2k7
VMware ESX server 3.5
VMware VDI
SCOM
SCCM
SMS
Blackberry
Cisco IP Tel
Cisco WAN
Cisco LAN
Cisco WiFi
MS OCS
MS Sharepoint <-- hopefully passing off please dear god :)
Server Provisioning
Desktop / Laptop Tier 3 Support
Video Conferencing
QoS
I am sure there are other things but for now that's what pops into my head. So expect to see this blog fill with technical detail regarding these and other topics.
Title: Sr. Infrastructure Administrator (for now we're in a merger could change who knows)
Job Functions: EVERYTHING! more specifically:
MS Windows Server 2k - 2k8
MS Exchange 2k3 - 2k7
VMware ESX server 3.5
VMware VDI
SCOM
SCCM
SMS
Blackberry
Cisco IP Tel
Cisco WAN
Cisco LAN
Cisco WiFi
MS OCS
MS Sharepoint <-- hopefully passing off please dear god :)
Server Provisioning
Desktop / Laptop Tier 3 Support
Video Conferencing
QoS
I am sure there are other things but for now that's what pops into my head. So expect to see this blog fill with technical detail regarding these and other topics.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)