Wednesday, February 22, 2012

The VCP5 can smell fear

For me, it was the fact that I'd never actually gone through an AutoDeploy setup. I mean, Enterprise Plus license level only with large shops that are deploying massive hosts? Not used often. I use the ESX Deployment Appliance. The every-person's version of kickstart for ESXi systems. I love EDA.

Anyway. The test could sense that I had skimmed the AutoDeploy documentation. I'm sure it has sensed fear from others on different subjects. A respectable 400 considering that I probably missed all the autodeploy questions.

And I totally stole and modified the VCP button. VCP#22708 on 3,4&5. VCAP5-DCD next.

Monday, February 13, 2012

hostdatastoresystem.createvmfsdatastore for object datastoresystem error

Well, from the ramblings of other blogs and the community forums, that ^ error string from the vSphere Client could mean just about anything could be wrong with your storage, your LUNs or your storage network.
In my case, after a long call with Dell EqualLogic and VMware, it turned out to be MTU size. In order to make my world right again, the MTU size on the Dell 6224 switches needed to be higher than the MTU size on the surrounding infrastructure. So: vSwitch, VMKernel and EqualLogic mtu: 9000. 6224's: 9126

Previous to that, there were logins and logouts on the iSCSI side, all sorts of errors seen in the vmkernel logs, but nothing...absolutely nothing...pointed in the direction of the MTU.

So, my short story that was actually really long is to show you, dear reader, that the first blog post that you find with this error message might not be your problem, it might not be the third or fifth solution you find. You might need to get help from someone else to check your configuration for something stupid that you've missed because you are less familiar with jumbo frames.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

ipcop 2.0.2

IPCOP2 still needs buslogic SCSI controller; and in order to use BusLogic, make sure you've chosen Other Linux 32bit.

And E1000 nics (but you should have known that).

Legacy Applications

I got it. I've got a better handle on "cloud" than ever before. Aaron Delp and Brian Gracely helped me there, putting it in perspective of "traditional" hypervisor/cloud stacks. Drink up: Drink Me. Google their names and great things pop up. From here in the trenches, it's good to get a high level overview every once and a while.