i upgraded vcenter 4.1 to 5.1 a few nights ago. the whole process took about 3.5 hours for me because of a couple of hiccups during the install and an unexpected surprise after the install finished. i did all of the SSO database prep work previously so i didn’t have to deal with that at […]
i’ve been reading over the docs for upgrading to vcenter 5.1 the only gotcha i’ve come across is the manual setting up of the SSO (single sign-on) database and users. you would only do this if you were using a database other than sql express (which i imagine everyone does, at least in production). anyways, […]
here’s another procedure that doesn’t come up too often…raising the AD functional levels. to check the current forest and domain functional levels go to AD Domains and Trusts and then right-click on the domain name and choose properties. both functional levels should be listed. raise domain functional level: right-click the domain name and choose “Raise […]
i’ve personally only had to go through the adprep process once in 2009 (so far). i figured it would be good to notate the process for future reference though. it came up again recently for a different AD domain… for introducing a windows 2008 DC: run the following from the windows 2008 install media on […]
ben mentioned to me about 2 weeks ago that when installing update rollups for exchange 2007 you should start with the CAS servers first. i found an MS article that said the same thing. so i installed the latest rollup on the CAS, hub transport, and then finally the mailbox servers. i ran the updates […]
it’s necessary to temporarily prevent a compromised exchange account from sending out spam. you could of course disable the mailbox, but then the mailbox would be marked for deletion and would be purged in 30 days. so if you forgot to reconnect the mailbox before the 30 days you’d probably have to restore the mailbox from a […]
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553 psexec example: psexec \\remote-computername ipconfig /all pretty neat program
to hook up a md1200 DAS to a r510 a PERC h800 adapter card is required. initially, we were shipped a h810 adapter card which happened to be a low-profile pcie card and thus would not fit correctly in the r510 (which requires standard sized cards) the md1200 is connected via mini-SAS cables and the […]
we experienced this issue in 2010, but i never got around to fully documenting the cause and solution. after a planned ESX host reboot, the host would not reconnect to vcenter (no matter how much time went by). /var/log/messages shows: Sep 22 10:26:05 esx14 xinetd[3078]: START: vmware-authd pid=25229 from=127.0.0.1 Sep 22 10:26:05 esx14 xinetd[3078]: EXIT: vmware-authd status=255 […]
i seem to forget how to do this every time i need to actually do it… if you have an expired cert on a windows terminal server then restarting the “Terminal Services Configuration” service should auto-generate a new cert. opening up a remote Certificates MMC should allow you to export the newly generated Remote Desktop […]