Cisco FPR – Re-image from FTD to ASA Code
KB ID 0001766 Problem Note: This procedure is to re-image a Cisco Firepower device from FTD to ASA code, (in this example a Cisco FPR 1010). Why would you want to do this? Well to be frank FTD is bobbins, so if you have a device running FTD code you might want to ‘convert’ it to ASA code. If you tried to do this with an older firewall (ASA 5500-X) then you needed to go to Cisco TAC and try and get them to give you an...
Convert MBR Partitioned Drives to GPT
KB ID 0001407 Problem I got asked if I’d ever had to do this today, I vaguely remember having this problem in the past, but I can’t remember how I solved it. You set the ‘Partition Table Type’ on a disk in Windows, when the drive is first initialised, like so; And the default is MBR, so that usually gets ticked, the problem is MBR only supports disks up to 2TB in size. Now if it’s just a new disk, with...
Migrate a VM from vCenter to Azure
KB ID 0001510 Problem Last time we looked at migrating from vCenter to Hyper-V, now we will use the MVMC (Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter) to take a VMware (vCenter) virtual machine and convert/upload it to Microsoft Azure. Note: MVMC is not ‘officially’ supported and this procedure requires you to create some ‘legacy’ (for legacy in Azure read ‘classic’) ways of doing things. So this might not...
Cisco ASA – Converting IKEv1 VPN Tunnels to IKEv2
KB ID 0001196 Problem We’ve had IKEv2 support on Cisco ASA for a while, (since version 8.4). I tend to setup site to site VPN tunnels at command line, and on the rare occasions I’m using the ASDM I normally just ignore the IKEv2 settings. Like all techies I know a way that works, so I will keep doing it that way. What’s the difference between IKEv1 and IKEv2? IKE version 2 is a lot more efficient and has a smaller...
VMware ESXi – Converting ‘Thick’ Provisioned Drives to ‘Thin’, and ‘Thin’ to ‘Thick’
KB ID 0000579 Problem Thin provisioning of hard drives is pretty cool stuff, full support for thin provisioning was brought in with vSphere version 4. Put simply a thin proviosioned drive is as big as it needs to be, and a thick provisioned drive is set to its maximum size when it’s created. The virtual machines that use these hard drives don’t know, and assume that their hard drive is a set size (even if it is thin...