Brandon Yap – Page 6

P2V old linux distributions with VMware Converter

Just the other day, I had the “privilege” of P2V’ing some really old CentOS 3.7 and 3.8 physical servers. The process certainly had it’s challenges. Here is how I did it. Very old distributions of Linux will not support any of the virtual SCSI controllers provided to the guest by vSphere. You need to firstly convert the disks to IDE, then modify GRUB to boot the OS from the converted IDE disks. P2V the server When till the process is completes, or errors at at the end. We will now convert the disks to IDE. Edit the VM’s Settings and […]

P2V old linux distributions with VMware Converter Read More »

Setting up OverPlay in Viscosity

This article will cover how you go about plugging the OverPlay VPN service into Viscosity, for which there are no instructions on how to do anywhere on the net. If you have questions about what OverPlay or Viscosity is, then this article is not for you. Pre-requisites Viscosity installed Download the OverPlay connections list from here. Download the OverPlay CA cert from here. Have your username and password handy Choose the server you want to connect to from the server list. Making it happen Uncompress the connections file Bring up Preferences in Viscosity. Click on the + icon in the

Setting up OverPlay in Viscosity Read More »

Unable to update iLO3 firmware on HP BL465c G7 blades

We’ve recently needed to upgrade the OA firmware on our HP C7000 blade enclosures to support Gen8 blades. A pre-requisite is to first make sure the ROM/BIOS and iLO firmware is up to a certain level. While attempting to upgrade iLO on the HP BL465c G7 blades, quite often i’d get an error upgrading from 1.16 and below up to 1.50. I’ve contacted HP about it and they refer to a support document detailing steps on how to perform steps to recover from a failed iLO update. These steps are quite involved and require downing a server, setting DIP switches

Unable to update iLO3 firmware on HP BL465c G7 blades Read More »

Unable to SSH into ESXi server

You’ve turned on SSH, and even enabled the firewall profile for SSH. But for some reason you still can’t SSH into the ESXi server and get a “Connection Refused” message back when hitting port 22. You’ve also checked your corporate firewall and that’s it’s not blocking comms. Have a look in Tasks and Events to see if the server’s ramdisk for root is full. There’s a good chance that it is. This is a problem i’ve encountered with vSphere 5.1 recently and is preventing SSH from starting properly. The cause of the ramdisk filling up is ESXi not truncating /var/log/wtmp

Unable to SSH into ESXi server Read More »

Vantec NST-D100SU and 3TB drives

If you purchased your Vantec NST-D100SU drive dock some time ago, there’s a good chance it won’t support 3TB drives. You’ll only see around 800MB of space when you plug your 3TB drive in, where 2TB drives work just fine. To fix the problem you’ll need a firmware update to support the larger capacity drives. For some reason this information isn’t available on the Vantec website. I had to contact technical support directly. They took about half a month to reply so to save you the hassle here are the links. The firmware update can be obtained direct from Vantec

Vantec NST-D100SU and 3TB drives Read More »