I have the privilege of actually receiving college credit while working at my current employer. I have to work extra, but my employer benefits by getting a project completed that otherwise would not have been done and I get experience and college credit.

The project that I've chosen this semester is to provide a self-service portal for our application developers so that they may spin up their own virtual machine instances for testing. Due to our current infrastructure I've chosen to base the self-service portal on Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 and System Center App Controller (SCAC)

I had fits trying to get a new VM to receive a DHCP address from our current network DHCP servers. I found a TechNet article that told me why. Read on.

If you have everything configured in SCVMM and your VMs are not getting DHCP addresses from your normal DHCP servers, this line in a MS TechNet article will tell you why:


If you want to use Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) that is already available on the network to assign IP addresses to virtual devices in a specified VLAN, create network sites with only VLANs assigned to them.


I found this sentence in this TechNet article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj721568.aspx

Anyway, if you already have your Logical Networks, Network Sites, Uplink Port Profiles, Logical Switches, and VM Networks setup you'll have to remove your VM Network and disassociate the Logical Network with the Uplink Port Profile. Once that is complete, edit your Network Site and remove the Subnet definition. Keep the VLAN ID if you have multiple physical VLANs already defined and want DHCP on a specific VLAN ID.

Needless to say, SCVMM is a complicated beast, as is the rest of the System Center suite. Coming from a VMware background it seems to me that the network configuration is overly complex. Maybe I'll change my mind after we finish this project, but for now I'm having fits trying to setup both DHCP and Static IP Pools in SCVMM.

For those interested, I am enrolled in an Experiential Learning program at the University of Illinois at Springfield as part of my Computer Science undergraduate degree. For more details about the Applied Study Term at UIS check out http://www.uis.edu/appliedstudy/students/infoforstudents/. Also checkout UIS for great online degree programs http://www.uis.edu

Have fun with SCVMM,
Flux.

We recently starting testing the SCOM 2012 Management Agent for Linux on a test server running CentOS 6.4 x86_64. Since we just installed a minimal set of packages via an automated kickstart the hostname of the machine wasn't set to the DNS resolved name.

After the SCOM agent was installed and even after we changed the hostname and setup the proper DNS the SCOM console was still barking about an SSL certificate common name matching the hostname of the server.

Every once in a while when I'll try to drag and drop something like an email in my Outlook Inbox to a sub-folder, or drag and drop files in my GUI FTP program and it just won't work.

My fix was just to hit the Escape key on my keyboard a few time. Poof! I can now drag and drop again.

If this doesn't work for you, make sure that one of the special keys like Alt or Ctrl aren't stuck.

Drag and drop away.

One of my resolutions for 2013 is to write and post articles more frequently. Here's my first attempt.

At my company we are heavy users of VMware/ESX/ESXi. It's what we have used for well over 8 years. One of the reasons why: it just works, it's stable, and (as it related to this post) the virtual networking is just simpler (in my opinion).

We recently upgraded our vSphere infrastructure to ESXi version 5.0 Update 1a and we were having some issues upgrading the VMware Tools.

We were getting a Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime error related to TPVCGateway.exe. It appears that this was an issue that was resolved by an ESXi 4.1 patch.

The root cause in our case was that we disable the Print Spooler on all of our servers for security. Well this disabling caused an issue with the VMware Tools uninstaller if the Thin Print virtual print driver was installed.

After patching our vCenter Server recently we were no longer able to use the "Search Inventory" box to search our virtual infrastructure. When we tried we would receive the following error:


Login to the query service failed. Unable to connect ...


The full error text has been abbreviated.

We were getting the following error trying to deploy a new WCF service because the domain account which runs the service was not a local admin on the server on which it was installed:


Service cannot be started. System.ServiceModel.AddressAccessDeniedException: HTTP could not register URL http://+:8000/ourservice/. Your process does not have access rights to this namespace (see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=70353 for details).


The easy fix would have been to add the user as a local admin, but that's not the most security way to resolve the issue.