My Blog, My Precious.

Restarting and diagnosing problems with the Management agents on an ESX or ESXi Server

admin — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 11:02:49 +0000

See here for the command line option when the management agent refuses to restart.

There are also some good links on the VMware community website for diagnosing VMware host connection problems – see here and here.

Updating Recipient Policies and Address Lists for Exchange 2010 from Exchange 2003

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:17:02 +0000

See a great write up here for upgrading Address Lists and Recipient Policies during the Exchange 2003 -> Exchange 2010 migration.

Resetting BIOS Password.

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:10:29 +0000

CMOS De-Animator; 32bit and 64bit versions

Grab a copy from here.

CMOS De-Animator is a service utility which allows you to invalidate the checksum of your system’s CMOS memory, resetting all settings to default and clearing any stored BIOS passwords (if any) upon re-boot. The main advantage of my utility is, that it can work under every Windows operating system, and no administrator privileges should be normally required! The utility has no GUI – only a confirmation message to begin or exit, error handling messages and a success dialog box upon successful operation. The utility is very portable, no installation required.

VMware Disk Performance cont…

admin — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 07:23:03 +0000

Continuing the theme on VMware SAN disk performance, I came across this VMware performance white paper on Scalable Storage Performance.

A very good thread on disk performance can be found here.

VMware Disk Performance – tracking with Virtual Center.

admin — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 07:17:20 +0000

You can use Virtual Center to track performance by creating custom charts, you can see how here.

NFS and IP-Hash loadbalancing

admin — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:00:21 +0000

Frank Denneman wrote a great article on how VMware IP Hash and Loadbalancing actually works.

I came across the above article by reading about Standby NICs and Load Balancing from Yellow-Bricks.com see here.

Sample configuration of EtherChannel / Link aggregation (LACP) with ESX and Cisco/HP switches

admin — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:57:03 +0000

This article describes concepts, limitations and sample configurations of link aggregation / NIC Teaming / LACP / Ether-Channel connectivity between ESX and Physical Network Switches, in particular, Cisco and HP.

A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual NFS customers using VMware

admin — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:54:40 +0000

Taken from Virtual Geek, see here for an excellent article on all things NFS.

Problem with Outlook 2003 and Exchange 2010

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:57:58 +0000

If you get the following error message after migrating over to Exchange 2010:

Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Unable to open the Outlook window. The set of folders could not be opened.

It is because the default with Exchange 2010 is encrypted RPC traffic. This is easily rectified, you can find the encrption setting in MS Exchange mail properties under control panel for the PC. See here for more information.

SSL Mutual Authentication Failure

admin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:57:51 +0000

Here is a guide on how to enable/disable your MSSTD. You will need to publish this information using Exchange PowerShell using the following command:

Set-OutlookProvider EXPR -CertPrincipalName:”msstd:mail.contoso.com”

See here for the official Microsoft update on this issue.