How-tos

AutoCorrect hell – VMware

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If you are like me and can’t stand it when Office Applications change the casing of Pronouns such as “VMware” to “Vmware” for example, there is a quick fix you can do. Most may already be aware, but this has hassled me one too many times today, and I therefore sought out the option to prevent it from happening. I was using Excel 2010, however similiar steps should apply to all Office Applications.

 

  • Go to the File -> Help -> Options -> Proofing menu.
  • Click “AutoCorrect Options” -> make sure the tickbox for “Correct two INitial CApitals” is either off, or alternatively and the better option, click “Exceptions”.
  • Add an entry called “VMware” under the “INital CAps” tab.
  • Apply

For a fun list of VMware spelling derivatives be sure to check out Darren Woollard’s “VMware, it’s all in the name” blog post.

 

Live Migrating a VM on a Hyper-V Failover Cluster fails – Processor-specific features not supported

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I have been working on setting up a small cluster of Hyper-V Hosts (running as VMs), nested under a bunch of physical VMware ESXi 5.0 hosts. Bear in mind I am quite new to Hyper-V, I have only ever really played with single host Hyper-V setups in the past. Having just finishing creating a Hyper-V failover cluster in this nested environment, and configuring CSV (Cluster Shared Volume) Storage for the Hyper-V hosts, I created a single VM to test the “live migrate” feature of Hyper-V. Upon telling the VM to live migrate from host “A” to host “B”, I got the following error message.

“There was an error checking for virtual machine compatibility on the target node”. The description reads “The virtual machine is using processor-specific features not supported on physical computer “DEVHYP02E”.

 

So my first thought was, perhaps there is a way to mask processor features, similar to the way VMware’s EVC for host physical CPU compatibility works? If you read the rest of the error message it does seem to indicate that there is a way of modifying the VM to limit processor features used.

 

So the solution in this case is to:

  • First of all power down your VM
  • Using Hyper-V Manager, right-click the VM and select “Settings”
  • Go to the “Processor” section and tick the option on for “Migrate to a physical computer with a different processor version” under “Processor compatibility”
  • Apply settings
  • Power up the VM again

 

Processor compatibility settings - greyed out here as I took the screenshot after powering the VM up again.

 

So now if you try and live migrate to another compatible Hyper-V host, the migration should work.

 

Changing Registry entries on multiple systems with PowerShell and Remoting

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A few weeks ago, a colleague asked if I knew of a way to script the change or modification of the Registered Owner / Organization information on a Windows Server system (2003 or 2008). I knew that this could be achieved with PowerShell and had some initial ideas, so I spent a few minutes whipping up the script below.

For this to work, you should ideally have all systems on the same Windows Domain and have enabled PowerShell remoting on each system that needs to be changed. Of course you could also just run the script on a single workstation/server on its own without the need for PSRemoting.

 

# On all remote machines that need their info changed
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
Enable-PSRemoting # Say yes to all prompts
#region This part only needed if machines do not belong to the same domain...
# Note: This can be a security risk, only use if you are sure you want to allow any host as a trusted host. (e.g. fine for lab environments)
cd wsman::localhost\client
Set-Item .\TrustedHosts * # Say yes to all prompts
#endregion
# Run on your management machine/machine you are using to update all others...
$computers = @("SERVER1","SERVER2","SERVER3")

foreach ($computer in $computers) {
    Enter-PSSession $computer
    cd 'HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion'
    Set-ItemProperty -Path . -Name "RegisteredOwner" -Value "Auth User"
    Set-ItemProperty -Path . -Name "RegisteredOrganization" -Value "Lab"
    Exit-PSSession
}

 

So the above should update your registered owner and organization details for each server listed in the $computers array. (Specify your own host names here). The above script should be easy enough to modify if you are looking to change other registry entries. Finally, don’t forget that you should always be careful when updating registry, especially via script – make sure you have backups!

 

HP P2000 G3 FC MSA – troubleshooting a faulty Controller (blinking Fault/Service Required LED)

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Setting up a new HP P2000 G3 FC MSA with dual controllers over the last couple of days for a small staging environment, I ran into issues from the word go. The device in question was loaded with 24 SFF disks and two Controllers (Controller A and B).

 

On the very first boot we noticed a fault (amber) LED on the front panel. Inspecting the back of the unit, I noticed that Controller A and B were both still flashing their green “FRU OK” LEDs, (which according to the manual means that the controllers were still booting up), even after waiting a number of hours. On Controller A, I could see a blinking amber “Fault/Service Required” LED. Following through the troubleshooting steps in the manuals lead nowhere as the end synopsis was to check the event logs. Even the Web interface was acting up – I could not see the controller’s listed, could not see any disks and the event logs were completely empty. Obviously there was a larger issue at hand preventing the MSA and even the Web interface from functioning properly. To further confuse matters, after shutting down and restarting the device, controller B starting blinking the amber LED instead of A this time, both still stuck in their “Booting up” state. Refer to the linked LED diagram below and you’ll see that the LED flashing green is labelled as 6, and the amber blinking LED is the one labelled as 7 on the top controller in the diagram.

LED Diagram

HP Official documentation

After powering the unit down completely, and then powering back up again, the MSA was still stuck in the same state. Powering down the unit once more, removing and reseating both controllers did not help either. Lastly, I powered it all off again, removed controller A completely, then powered up the device with just Controller B installed. Surprisingly the MSA booted up perfectly, and LED number 6 (FRU OK) went a nice solid green after a minute or so of booting up. No amber LEDs were to be seen. Good news then! Hot plugging controller A back in at this stage with the device powered on resulted in both controllers reporting a healthy status and all the disks and hardware being detected. A final test was done by powering off everything and powering it back up again as it should be from a cold start. Everything worked this time.

 

Here is a photo of the rear of the device once all was resolved showing the solid green FRU OK LEDs on both controllers.

 

 

Bit of an odd one, but it would seem that controllers together were preventing each other from starting up. Removing one then booting up with this seemed to solve the problem, and at the end of the day all hardware was indeed healthy. After this the 24 disks were assigned and carved up into some vdisks to be presented to our ESXi hosts!

 

Using Project “Onyx” to find the equivalent PowerCLI script to achieve tasks done in the vSphere Client

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A few days ago someone dropped a comment on one of my blog posts asking how they could Enter an ESXi host into maintenance without migrating VMs off of it automatically using PowerCLI. The -Evacuate switch for the cmdlet in question (Set-VMHost) didn’t see to be working when assigning the value of $false and hence they were unable to put hosts into maintenance mode without evacuating VMs first with PowerCLI.

Perhaps the cmdlet was being used incorrectly, or there is a better way of doing this, but that is not the point of this post. The point of this post is to show you the power and usefulness of Project “Onyx”. Project “Onyx” is an application released (quite some time ago!) by VMware that is essentially a “script recorder”. It connects to your vCenter instance, and in turn, you connect to it as a proxy using your vSphere client. Communications are not secured when doing this, so everything you do in your vSphere client is able to be recorded. You essentially end up with a “recording” of API calls that can be utilised in PowerCLI. Where this comes in handy is where you are not able to achieve something with PowerCLI’s already huge library of cmdlets. In this case the -evacuate switch of Set-VMHost was not working the way I expected it to work, and so to avoid wasting time trying to figure out what I needed to do, I just fired up Project Onyx, connected to it via the vSphere Client, then told an ESXi host to enter maintenance mode (unticking the migrate powered off / suspended VMs option of course) whilst the Project Onyx application was set to “record” mode.

The console then collected the necessary script, and I just modified it as necessary to create a small script that did the exact same task, but this time in PowerCLI.

 

To use Project “Onyx” simply download it from this page, then run the executable once you have extracted the .zip file. Tell Onyx to connect to your vCenter Server, then use your vSphere Client to connect to the machine that Onyx is running on (IP). Make sure you specify the correct listening port in the vSphere Client connection too – it will be the port listed in the Window Title bar of the actual Project “Onyx” application when it is running. Click the record button in the Application and then perform the required tasks using the vSphere Client.

 

Project Onyx application window with some recorded script. Note the port 1545 in the Window Title Bar.

 

Connecting to Onyx as a proxy