I don’t think, Ive ever run the VMware Standalone Converter, without at least one error message or popup complaining about something! Today I was trying to convert a clients old Windows Server 2003 document management server, when trying to deploy the agent this happened;
Unable to connect to the network share ‘{Sever-name-or-IP} \ADMIN$’.
Solution
It’s a pretty descriptive error, can you map a drive to this machine and open a network share manually? Is the ‘server service’ running? In my case the problem was easily diagnosed;
As I wasn’t about to start enabling SMBv1 on the clients Windows 2019 server! So I simply installed the VMware Standalone converter on one of their existing 2008 members servers instead, and ran it from there.
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I still think P2V conversions are cool, and I’ve been doing them since version 3! It seems though every time I try and do one with the standalone converter though I get this error;
VMware vCenter Converter Standalone
Unable to complete installation/uninstallation of converter agent on ‘{target}’
Solution
I always spend five minutes messing with firewalls, checking remote registry services, credentials, and the fix is nearly always the same;
Locate VMware-Converter-Agent.exe in C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone, copy it to the target machine, and install it manually. Then try the conversion again.
If it gets this far, your problem is solved.
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Just as I was hunting around for an NFR version of Cisco ISE 1.3, they released 1.4. I wasn’t sure if I could upgrade my NFR version without breaking it so I thought I would ‘have a go’.
Solution
If you read the documentation for the upgrade of 1.2 to 1.4, I suggest you skip straight to the tasks to do AFTER upgrade, as it has a habit of resetting things back to default, best to make sure you know how everything is setup that might break before you start.
This upgrade took me a long time! The best part of an afternoon!
1. Before we do anything let’s take a snapshot, just in case it all goes to hell in a hand cart.
2. Gotcha! The upgrade fails if you have any expired certificates, even disabling them wont help, you need to delete all expired root certs before you start.
3. Copy the upgrade file from an FTP server to the ISE device, it wont show you any progress bar, go and get a coffee, if it does not error it’s probably copying over OK :).
4. When you get the prompt back you can check it’s there with a ‘dir’ command.
5. Before you can upgrade you need to create a repository for the upgrade;
[box]
ISE-01/admin# configure terminal
Enter configuration commands, one per line. End with CNTL/Z.
ISE-01(config)# repository upgrade
ISE-01(config-Repository)# url disk:
% Warning: Repositories configured from CLI cannot be used from the ISE web UI and are not replicated to other ISE nodes.
If this repository is not created in the ISE web UI, it will be deleted when ISE services restart.
ISE-01(config-Repository)# exit
ISE-01(config)# exit
[/box]
6. Then you need to ‘prepare’ for the upgrade.
[box]
ISE-01/admin# application upgrade prepare ise-upgradebundle-1.2.x-to-1.4.0.253.x86_64.tar.gz upgrade
Getting bundle to local machine...
md5: 35a159416afd0900c9da7b3dc6c72043
sha256: e3358ca424d977af67f8bb2bb3574b3e559ce9578d2f36c44cd8ba9e6dddfefd
% Please confirm above crypto hash matches what is posted on Cisco download site.
% Continue? Y/N [Y] ? Y
[/box]
7. Start the upgrade, this takes ages, go and have at least three coffees.
