The I.T. Nerve Center

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).

Trying to put a host into maintenance mode in vCenter and one machine wouldn't VMotion because it said VMware Tools were being installed or upgraded.

Searching Google came up with this article which applies to ESX 4.x:

http://lonesysadmin.net/2009/12/11/how-to-cancel-a-stuck-vmware-tools-in...

Well vmware-cmd is gone in ESXi 5.x. Here's how you do it in ESXi 5.x:


cd /vmfs/volumes/[datastore]/[vmname]
vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms


Note the VmId of the machine having the issue. Then run:


vim-cmd vmsvc/tools.cancelinstall VmId


We recently upgrade to vCenter Server 5.1 and had an issue with our XenDesktop Desktop Controllers. Version 5.1 significantly changes the authentication method with vCenter by breaking out authentication to a separate service called the vCenter Single Sign On service.

When viewing the information in the XD Desktop Studio the host connection to our vCenter server had a red X indicating there was an issue connecting to the host. The XD Host Service was started so that wasn't the problem.

I was having a heck of a time getting Globalscape CuteFTP Professional 8.3 working for SFTP (FTP over SSH) sites. Since the server on which I was installing the software didn't need any of the "Productivity Tools" listed in the installer, I de-selected that hive.

After installation everything appeared to be working however when I tried to connect to an SFTP site I was greeted with the following error:


*** CuteFTP 8.3 - build Oct 22 2008 ***


STATUS:> [10/28/2012 6:32:47 PM] Initializing SFTP21 module...