vSphere: Get ESX Server Serial Numbers
KB ID 0001670 Problem A few weeks ago I needed to sort out some extended warranty for a customers servers. To do that I needed the serial numbers of those servers, (a mixture of IBM/Lenovo and Dell Servers). As I didn’t fancy a drive to two different datacenters, I wanted to try and get them programatically. Solution After some searching I came across a post by one of my old EE buddies LucD with exactly what I needed. I’m...
VMware Edge Gateway VPN to Cisco ASA
KB ID 0001658 Problem I was asked to setup a VPN to help out a colleague this week. When I had a look, one end turned out to be an Edge Gateway, I wasn’t that concerned, I’d done similar things in my prior role, I just didn’t have access to the vCloud or VMware at this datacenter. Depite my best efforts on the ASA, the tunnel refused to come up, it took a little looking ‘under the covers’ to accurately...
DHCP Scope: Full of BAD_ADDRESS Entries
KB ID 0001651 Problem I had a client machine struggling to get an DHCP address, and when I looked in DHCP the scope it was full of this; BAD_ADDRESS This address Is Already in Use Solution A tour of Google and forums is full of posts by people with this problem, and other than, ‘Oh I looked in the logs and fixed it’ (with no mention of what log, or where this log was), or ‘Yeah I used Wireshark and located a problem...
vSphere HTML5 Web Client – Disable the Console Timeout
KB ID 0001118 Problem One annoying thing about the vSphere web client is the fact it throws you out after a period of inactivity. Now I know there are straight forward security reasons for this, and on a production environment thats fine. But on my test network theres just me, sighing every few minutes and logging back in again. As the ‘Flash’ client is getting depreciated I’ll concentrate on the HTML5 client, but...
Resizing (Shrinking) Drives With VMware Standalone Converter
KB ID 0000185 Problem Using: vSphere 6.7 and VMware Standalone Converter Version 6.2.0 I’m performing this procedure on vSphere 6.7, back ith the release of vSphere 5, This process changed, with vSphere 4 and VI3, you had to install VMware Converter on the vCenter Server then download and enable the plugin in your VI client software (like this). VMware now only has the “standalone converter”, so now you DONT install...
Adding Windows Server NFS Shares to VMware ESX
KB ID 0000319 Problem You have a Windows 2019/2016, 2012, or 2008 server with plenty of storage space, and you would like to present that to an ESX/ESXi server as a datastore. You can configure a folder (or drive) as an NFS share and present it to VMware vSphere, so that it can be used as a datastore. Note: For Server 2008 and vSphere 4/5 Scroll down. Create NFS Shares on Windows Server 2019, 2016, and 2012 Essentially you need to add...