On a bit of a shorter note to my previous article/novella1https://blah.cloud/architecture/designing-modern-private-cloud-network/ – I have been moving my lab to a bit more of an “enterprise” style architecture – deploying SRM was in the way for that, so I had the need to set up another vCenter, however this gave the opportunity to move to a […]
Deploying Dell OpenManage on ESXi and vCenter 6
If you’ve been reading my other posts of late, you will have gathered I’ve been building a new lab. I say “new”, the last one was a single R710 with a ReadyNas Ultra 6 attached. So essentially, this is my first REAL lab. It’s mostly based on Dell hardware; it’s cheap on eBay, I like […]
vSphere HA Configuration fails: Operation Timed Out
I recently rebuilt my lab and added 2x new ESXi hosts, I re-used my old single host in the process which I upgraded from ESXi 5.5 to 6.0 and patched to the same level as the new hosts. Everything was working as expected until it came for the time to enable HA. My old host […]
Windows Integrated Auth (SSO) fails in vCenter 6.0
If you’ve just spun up a new vCenter 6.0 appliance, have joined it to the domain and added a new identity source but have found that your integrated windows auth (the handy checkbox you use for SSO) isn’t working with this error: A General System error occurred: Cannot get user info Then it’s because the […]
Using AD signed certificates with vCenter Server Appliance 6
Creating signed certs for vCenter has never been easy, with the new release of 6.0 though this has changed somewhat, there is a built in certificate manager that allows you to import a CA (say Microsoft AD) cert and key to have VMCA sign it’s own certs with and make them trusted. First thing, we […]
Creating a vSphere 6 certificate template in Active Directory
Signing certs for VMware has always been a pain in the ass, it’s gotten a lot better in v6 but there are a few caveats, what we’re going to do here is set up a certificate template in Active Directory from which we will sign our vCenter certificates. Load up your AD-CA box and run: […]
Deployment Options for vCenter Server Appliance 6.0
The new version of vSphere brings some major improvements to the vCenter management end of things, the main thing is that it is now a highly available solution (previously reserved for vCenter Server Heartbeat – a separate, now EOL, product VMware offered) that can run in two modes.
Extend Dell MD3000i Virtual Disk LUN Size
I have had the need recently to expand a LUN on a Dell MD3000i SAN to above 2TB that is presented to VMWare ESX 5.1 hosts. There are a few caveats here: