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System Administration

The Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite is a Swiss Army Knife for Home Lab networks

by Philip Sellers July 27, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

Building out the networking side of my home lab has been the most challenging part of my home lab. I’ll be the first to confess – I’m not a networking guy – at least, that’s not a primary focus for me. I rely on my network folks at work – but I understand enough to handle networking in vSphere, but when it comes to routing and things like OSPF and Spanning Tree, I let the professionals handle it.

I’ve written several times about the hardware and plans for my home lab systems. But, to mock up the enterprise environments that I’d like to in my lab, I needed a more powerful router – something capable of carrying multiple VLANs and routing for each. I have always relied on an integrated router with WiFi for my home, but this just wasn’t getting the job done. Last week, I wrote about upgrading my WiFi and this week, the router is in the cross-hairs.

The primary goals I had in my network were:

A dedicated home network for my wife, kids and TV’s to connect to Internet
Separate set of VLANs to mock up production vSphere environments
Separate video network for multicast traffic from an HD HomeRun to my MacPro with EyeTV
The MacPro needs to be on my primary, home network but also must route to the other VLANs to manage vSphere, VMs, and the HDHomeRun.

There are some software solutions that would help me like VyOS, the open source distribution of Vyatta which is owned by Brocade. I looked at VyOS a couple times, but I disliked this method because everything would still come back to my primary home network. I wanted a cleaner solution – so I looked at hardware. There are several flash-able, hardware routers and I looked at several running DD-WRT or Tomato. I was very close to purchasing one of these solutions when a coworker suggest I look at an Ubiquiti’s EdgeRouter Lite.

The Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite is an under-$100 hardware router running a flavor of Vyatta. If offers 3 ports on the Lite model with your choice of more ports if you needed them on higher models. There is also a Power Over Ethernet variant of the Lite model. The device is router only – no WiFi or other converged functions. The router is rated at 1 million packets per second, but not being a network nerd, that only sounds impressive to me – not sure how that stacks up versus the competition. It is certainly better than my Apple AirPort Extreme.

With this hardware router, I can have a dedicated port for my primary home network and one for home lab systems, with multiple VLANs, multiple DHCP zones and keep everything separate. It also means I had a host of other things capable from command line on the small, hardware box.

This wasn’t my first Ubiquiti network purchase. I had recently purchased a Ubiquiti UniFi AC wireless access point, which I wrote about last week. What I have discovered is that Ubiquiti makes good quality hardware, with enterprise-like features at a home cost. So, let me recap how this hardware hit my list of must-haves.

Step 1 – Dedicated Home Network

Out of the box, the EdgeRouter Lite comes with DHCP enabled on port 0 so you plug in the router, plug in a computer and go to the web interface on 192.168.1.1. You login with the generic ubnt/ubnt password combination and off you go. There is a wizard that allows for quick configuration of 2 LAN and 1 WAN ports – I used it to setup the EdgeRouter Lite as I intended to use it. Ports 0 and 2 became LAN ports and port 1 became my WAN port. Plug in my internet to port 1 and then uplink the EdgeRouter from port 0 to my network switch and my primary network was back online. This hit the first point on my list – a dedicated primary home network that is a no tinkering zone.

Step 1a – OpenVPN from EdgeRouter

Not long after getting my EdgeRouter, I began having some issues getting to Hulu. I was able to leverage Vyatta to setup an OpenVPN tunnel for my Apple TV only, thanks to instructions from Larry Land, to get around some sort of routing or blocking issue. Another great feather in the EdgeRouter’s cap. This configuration required some command-line action, but it was simple to configure and get running.

This exercise also taught me a bit about special routing tables and utilizing the Vyatta firewall features to redirect a single IP on my network to a specific set of routes or location. It was a bit of a crash course for me. But I can appreciate the flexibility that Vyatta brings under the covers of this device.

Step 2 – Separate VLANs for Home Lab

Next came setting up the separate VLANs for the home lab. That was a piece of cake. Within the EdgeRouter Lite’s web interface, you can add a VLAN interface onto a port with the click of button. Within 5 minutes, I had all 5 of my VLANs that I wanted for the home lab created on port 2 of the EdgeRouter. The add interface allows you to set an IP for the EdgeRouter on the new VLAN while defining it. After adding the VLAN, you have to create a DHCP scope within Services for each of the VLANs.

Step 3 – Separate Video Multicast from the Primary Network

While the EdgeRouter allows me to create a dedicated VLAN for video to keep multicast off of my primary network, I finally had a different light-bulb moment. I decided instead to direct wired my HD Homerun into the Mac Pro where I run EyeTV. The one problem that I ran into was getting an address for the HD HomeRun. I hard coded an IP on a different subnet on the secondary NIC of Mac Pro and then added DHCP on the Mac for that NIC only to hand out an address to the HD HomeRun.

Other Capabilities

This is a router, after all, so static and dynamic routes along with a host of network routing protocols are included – like OSPF, RIP and BGP.

Under Services section in the web configuration tool, you will find both DHCP and DNS forwarding. The DNS forwarding allows the router to serve as a local DNS server and then forward out those requests to specified servers. This is particularly great for what I want to do, where one VLAN may need to point back to my internal DNS server for the management and VM VLANs while others need to point to Google’s DNS or my ISP.

The built-in web interface allows for a lot of configuration without ever needing to go to the command line, but both methods are possible. The built-in firewall allows for different rules to be built based on groups or individual systems behind the router.

The EdgeRouter Lite also has Quality of Service (QoS) settings so I hope to be able to prioritize traffic from my AT&T MicroCell to have highest priority in the network, though I have not set this up yet. I will need to put in some research and see how to do that.

You may setup Dynamic DNS directly from the GUI of the EdgeRouter, assisting in resolution back to your network from remote locations.

Vyatta also allows you to setup VPN server on the device for remote access. I wrote about using the EdgeRouter Lite as a site-to-site VPN for OpenVPN, but it can also become a VPN server to allow you remote access back to your network. Rackspace has a great guide to setting this up in Vyatta. There are lots of other options within the VPN space – including having the EdgeRouter become its own OpenVPN server.

Verdict

I couldn’t be happier with the outcome and decision to purchase this router. The Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite is small and fits nicely into my structured wiring box. It is fast and capable and has kept up with everything I have needed. It has provided additional capabilities that may have been more difficult with other flash router solutions. It is quiet and it was also fairly inexpensive.

July 27, 2015 0 comments

Compute Datacenter Software Storage

HP sees Composable Infrastructure as the foundation of future IT

by Philip Sellers July 23, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

The company that created the converged infrastructure concept with its blades is at it again. HP announced during HP Discover plans around a concept called Composable Infrastructure. Now, let me be the first to say, much of what makes up Composable Infrastructure today isn’t new to HP. But, the name is new for an overarching strategy for individual developments that have been building in the company for a while.

First, what is Composable Infrasturcture? It is the idea of being able to control physical and virtual pools of resources with software through a single, consistent API with full lifecycle support for deployment, management, self-healing and decomissioning.

partners The idea is that through HP OneView and its available API’s, developers can define and call this API to compose, decompose or recompose the infrastructure into its desired specification. Big names within the developer community including OpenStack, Docker, Ansible, Puppet and Chef have all signed on to be a part of HP’s partner program around Composable Infrastructure.

In addition to the API capabilities within OneView, HP also announced a new, multi-year strategy to move beyond software automation to fully automate the lifecycle of bi-modal infrastructure that can bridge companies between traditional IT and new cloud-native IT. HP calls this strategy Project Synergy.

projectsynergy

For Project Synergy, the company plans to develop a full ecosystem which aims to allow for definition and instantiation on infrastructure – both physical and virtual – with integration into management and development platforms. It accelerates application and infrastructure orchestration for both traditional and cloud applications.

Not all new territory

When I say this isn’t a net new thing within HP, the first thing to look at is HP OneView. OneView 2.0 was announced during HP Discover and is the second major release of their infrastructure management product. During the life of version 1, OneView has consistently added new functionality in each point release. OneView has extended beyond blade servers and networking to include rack mount hardware and extended beyond servers to manage 3PAR storage, also, all during the version 1 release.

OneView brings the concept of a single management console to control and create servers, storage and networking. It is the cornerstone of the HP ConvergedSystems solutions – enabling a centralized management for these purpose built solutions. It has also become a monitoring and management platform for other HP infrastructure. HP realizes that all the goodness brought to ConvergedSystems by OneView can also be applied to larger pools of resources and this is where Composable Infrastructure comes in.

Another point in saying this isn’t new territory for HP is that RESTful API’s it has been working hard to develop in the HP ProLiant systems. HP is been working to create a RESTful API on the iLO4 management chips. Its another step in being able to take programatic definitions and instantiate those definitions on hardware. HP 3PAR has similiar capabilities through SSMC, which shares a similar DNA to OneView. And as a customer looking into HP, I fully expect (but have no confirmation) we will see similar interfaces develop in networking and for other storage platforms.

Bright Possibilities

Front and center in the Composable Infrastructure announcement is letting software call the shots. In the future, this allows orchestration tools to reach into a pool of raw compute, storage and network in hardware form and create the infrastructure it requires based on its definition. It would be very similar to the vision VMware has painted for cloud automation around the vSphere platform, only with physical hardware and lacking the VMware layers of software. For solutions like OpenStack and container technologies, this allows you to bypass the VMware vTax and work directly on hardware.

But the vision extends beyond providing a programatic way to provision and deprovision hardware. The vision is to integrate in a way that the full lifecycle is taken into account with automation, management and analytics to assist with the operation of the hardware for the entire life of the product it is supporting. HP wants to take its analytics and be able to make decisions and create self-healing infrastructure that is able to react to changes in the environment and continue to operate without manual intervention. Since all the definitions and all of the steps to create the hardware infrastructure are stored in software, the ability to recompose, as HP calls it, the infrastructure is viable in the future.

Again, the message sounds very similar to one the VMware has been talking about with vRealize products, but it is a vision that neither company has fully realized. Both, I’d argue, have significant assets in the areas needed, but neither one has an fully integrated, end-to-end solution at this time. The challenge is going to be how well these products integrate and how easily they can be deployed and configured for customers to realize the benefits of the vision. I think simplicity of management and configuration will be the key factor.

Bimodal infrastructure was another big buzzword with the HP folks during HP Discover and its the concept of having a single set of infrastructure serve your needs for both the traditional applications your enterprise needs along with the cloud applications that your enterprise should be investing in for the future, according to HP. The cloud native applications will allow the enterprise to be more agile, delivering innovation continually instead of in large, monolithic phases. Continual delivery will allow the organization to adjust incrementally as the environment changes in a way that is impossible with monolithic applications.

Vision always paints a picture of the perfect world and those practitioners who work in IT know that vision and reality often have a gap in between. The problem with orchestration and cloud automation packages to date have been the complexity required to configure and get these systems working. As this develops, my hope is that its done in a way that keeps things clean and simple so that customers can gain the most benefit. If HP OneView is a benchmark, there is hope that this can happen in HP.

July 23, 2015 0 comments

Datacenter Software Storage

Deploying HP OneView 1.20 for monitoring & replacing HP SIM

by Philip Sellers July 23, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

oneviewheader With the 1.20 release of HP OneView, HP has opened up the ability to monitor hardware without controlling all configuration and deployments using the tool. Along with the 1.20 release, HP introduced the OneView Standard license, which is a free license that allows HP customers to run OneView for monitoring only of hardware. This license level lets users use the dashboard and alerting features to view all of their ProLiant G6 and G7 hardware along with Gen8 and Gen9, including blade enclosures. These changes allow OneView to be a drop-in replacement for system management and replace HP System Insight Manager in many deployments.

For comparison, with the full-featured OneView Advanced license, customers can manage deployments on ProLiant Gen8 and Gen9 hardware. Customers can create server profiles and provision these onto blade and rackmount ProLiant hardware. In addition to ProLiant, OneView is also able to control network configuration for blade hardware and storage configurations connected to blade and rackmount hardware.

Hands-On Impressions

For anyone reading who may be accustomed to HP System Insight Manager (SIM), HP OneView is a huge leap forward. The UI is intuitive and easy to learn. The Standard license level allows most people to replace HP SIM if they have current generations of ProLiant hardware.

Once I deployed HP OneView in my environment, all that was needed was connecting it to my blade enclosures and ProLiant rackmount servers. The connection point is the iLO, so you fill in the iLO’s information, a username and password and then HP OneView configures its own user account on each server to connect and poll from the system.

After connecting the systems, you have a Dashboard view that shows you system health and problems. Its a pie chart that will show you color coded sections for systems either incompatible (in grey), healthy (green) or with warning and problems (yellow and red). You are able to click and drill down into each one of the slices to get filtered information about warnings or errors. The inventory is great and has good controls for filtering by state. In addition, you can look at servers by hardware type and see how many of each model you have plus, how many different configurations you have within a particular model – based on expansion cards and stats.

Admittedly, there is a lot of additional functionality that remains empty in a monitoring only configuration. Server profiles and interconnects areas will be blank.

In comparison with HP SIM, I’ve had OneView running for monitoring for months and have had to do zero babysitting. The alerts that come from OneView are superior to SIM. The alerts correlate the system name and alert state correctly, where SIM often has difficulty identifying the system name and usually reports things under the system serial number instead. We have them running in parallel currently and I get alerts from both systems, but I get more useful information from the HP OneView alerts.

I’m not sure I know anyone who would willingly choose HP SIM over HP OneView after giving a test drive. SIM still has a place if you have a lot of legacy hardware, ProLiant G5 and below. But, so far, this is a great step forward for system management as an HP customer.

FAQ for HP OneView 1.20 Release

July 23, 2015 0 comments

Datacenter Storage

Realizing the benefits of a Microsoft Premier support agreement

by Philip Sellers May 27, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

I do not normally get excited when talking about technical support but Microsoft Premier is different. The goal with having a Premier contract is that you will be more proactive, and try to locate and resolve issues before they become bigger problems. By purchasing this agreement you will also have access to an account manager that will communicate with you regularly to ensure that your goals and needs are being met.

One of the great benefits with a Premier agreement is the Risk Assessment Programs (RAPs). You are able to use a portion of your contract hours to have a Premier Field Engineer, onsite or remotely, analyze your environment. These engineers specialize in the product that they support. Microsoft has different RAPs for each of their products. An additional part of the RAP is knowledge transfer. The engineer will assess what you know and try to fill in any gaps. You will have access to an expert that will be able to answer any questions you may have about the product. Microsoft has developed tools to thoroughly check your configuration and will provide you with a detailed report. This report will contain the information on how to correct potential problems or confirm that what you have already done is to best practice.

We all face those problems that are difficult to resolve. It might be something that is uncommon and unique to your environment. The problem resolution support with Premier will enable you to access higher level engineers and easily escalate your case if needed. This was the original reason why my company decided to go with a Premier contract. We had an issue with Kerberos authentication that we were not able to get resolved using the standard technical support or through our other support channels. Once we were able to log a case with Premier we were able to quickly find a solution. I do not believe we would have been able to resolve our issue without it.

Another part of Premier is access to training. You will be able to use part of your hours towards training courses on a variety of different topics. You can also use part of your Premier hours to obtain a pass to the annual Microsoft Ignite Conference (formally known as TechEd). This can be helpful if you have a limited training budget.

From my experience our Premier agreement with Microsoft has proven its value. My company has done many RAPs for different applications including Exchange, Active Directory, Group Policy, and SharePoint. We have also had PFEs come onsite for consultations on Lync and implementing a proper EFS infrastructure. Every one of these engagements have exceed our expectations and have always left us in a better place than when we started. If you support an enterprise environment I recommend you visit the link below and see if you too could benefit from this program.

This article was not approve or requested by Microsoft. Since our experience with Microsoft Premier has been so good I thought I would share.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftservices/support.aspx

May 27, 2015 0 comments

Datacenter

With backups, it’s the restore that really counts

by Philip Sellers May 21, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

Broken iPhone When is the last time your backups were tested? For me, personally, it was a couple weeks ago. My wife and I were sleeping beside our very sick child in the hospital (he’s great now, by the way). My wife got up in the night to do something and her phone hit the floor – one of those unfortunate and precise hits that ruined the phone. The screen detached but didn’t shatter, but I wasn’t able to pull data off of it the next day. I went into one of my company’s stores and purchased a new phone. While there, I saw another father from our daycare who was doing the same – buying a new phone to replace his that ended up taking a cola bath. While I stayed and began my restore from the cloud backup, he left with fingers crossed that he might be able to dry out his phone in a bag of rice and get data off of it. I honestly don’t know if he succeeded. I left that store an hour later with an exact duplicate of my wife’s phone from a day earlier.

It’s a pretty common scenario at home. It’s a common scenario in business, too. Four years ago, a friend called me one Monday morning. She arrived to work to find out that her office suite had been flooded due to a burst pipe in the unit above her. No one was able to find her contact information over the weekend and so she arrived to the shock of her life – a very soggy and expensive problem. When she called me, she needed to know how safe her data was and to see about how to handle several computers who had spent the weekend at an indoor waterpark. After going through something of that magnitude, it brings a whole new urgency to data protection and she was ready to sign up for a cloud backup immediately. Two years later, another (near) tragedy struck – this time in the form of data corruption that lost all the data in her NAS. Fortunately, all the data was protected online and was restored to a clean volume a short time later. I could tell you other stories without happy endings from my years of experience.

The good news is that cloud backups or backup as a service makes it incredibly easy and attainable to have a bullet-proof backup strategy. It’s basically Baskin Robbins in cloud backup today – there’s a flavor for everyone. You can choose from simple file-based backups all the way up to mirrors of production servers that can be booted up in the cloud during a disaster. There’s specialized application mirror and application aware backups and everything in between. The moral of the story and what I hope you think about, is how safe is your data? Yes, you may have a backup that runs without error – but when’s the last time you tested a restore?

The infographic below from SingleHop gives some stats on cloud backups along with the causes and costs of downtime.

May 21, 2015 0 comments

Datacenter Storage Virtualization

HP 3PAR SSMC 2.1 makes Peer Persistence configuration easy as 1-2-3

by Philip Sellers May 19, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

With the 2.1 release of the HP 3PAR StoreServ Management Console, HP has enabled the creation and control of Peer Persistence configurations within the management tool. Peer Persistence is the HP branding for transparent LUN failover between storage arrays with no downtime – a concept VMware administrators will recognize is Metro Storage Clustering in the VMware vernacular. HP 3PAR Peer Persistence relies on operating systems which can use the ALUA command set of of the SCSI bus to recognize open and closed paths to a single volume. The source array provides open paths while the replication target shows its paths in standby. At a high level, when a switchover command is issued, the path states change from active to standby and vice-versus. ALUA allows the OS to recognize and redirect IO. Add a quorum witness server to the switchover magic and you have a

This addition to SSMC brings a simple three step process for provisioning new Peer Persistence volumes in the management GUI: Create a new volume, add it to Remote Copy and then Export the volume from both arrays. When an administrator adds the volume it into a remote copy group, the group auto-provisions and assigns the same World Wide Name (WWN) to the target, secondary volume and that is required for Peer Persistence. Previously, administrators performed this using the 3PAR Command Line Interface, and early adopters had to manually lookup and assign the WWN on the secondary array. The auto-provisioning will simplify the process and the chance for human error. The auto-provisioning can be enabled on any Remote Copy group through the SSMC interface. The administrator pre-defines the CPG for the remote array and enables the auto_failover and path_management policies to make a normal Remote Copy group into a Peer Persistent remote copy group.

Initiating a switchover of a Peer Persistence Remote Copy Group is now an options within the SSMC interface. The switchover command is found under the Remote Copy Group within the interface and is found with all the other operations under the Actions menu for a Remote Copy Group. When a switchover is initiated, the interface shows a status of that command, shows the original Remote Copy Group go into a stopped state, the target-side Remote Copy Group named with a similar name then appears and shows that the switchover has completed.

In order to make use of Peer Persistence, there is a fairly strict list of requirements you must meet. The most restrictive of the requirements is latency, since Peer Persistence is built on synchronous replication which the 3PAR platforms limit to 2.6 milliseconds or less of latency. This amount of latency allows for fairly liberal definitions of metro distances. So, first a quick review of all of the requirements for Peer Persistence and then a quick tour of the simple SSMC provisioning process.

Requirements for Peer Persistence

Below is a consolidated list of all the requirements for running HP 3PAR StoreServ arrays with Peer Persistence.

Round trip latency of 2.6 milliseconds or less.
2 arrays with Remote Copy 1-to-1 configuration in synchronous mode.
3PAR StoreServ Firmware 3.1.2 MU2 or newer for VMware and Firmware 3.2.1 or newer for Windows.
VMware ESXi 5.x or newer and Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2012 R2 for host OS.
All associated hosts are connected to both arrays.
Hosts created with 3PAR host persona 11 for VMware hosts and 15 for Windows hosts, which supports Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA).
Quorum Witness virtual machine at a third site, reachable by TCP/IP from the management port of the two 3PAR arrays.
All 3PAR Virtual Volumes (VV) exported from both arrays must have the same volume WWN, both source and target WWN should match.
Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) are supported. iSCSI and FCoE require later version of 3PAR StoreServ Firmware.
Both auto_failover and path_management polices in 3PAR Remote Copy Group configuration are required to enable automatic transparent failover.

Provisioning Peer Persistent Volumes with SSMC

Step 1: Create a new virtual volume by going to the Main Menu and choosing Virtual Volumes under Block Persona.
(File Persona is hidden in the screenshot below because the arrays connected to SSMC do not support File Persona, otherwise it is displayed next to Block Persona).

Complete the General section, but do not export the LUN yet.

Step 2: Create the Remote Copy Group located under the Main Menu in the Replication section. If you have an existing Remote Copy Group, click on the name of the group to edit it.

For Peer Persistence, the configuration is set here. The sections outlined in red are the sections required for Peer Persistence. To make it easiest, select the Create automatically option under Source, you must set Synchronous replication under Backup and you need to tick the Advanced Options checkbox and then check the Auto failover checkbox under Backup. Checking the Auto failover checkbox automatically enables Path Management, too.

Also within Remote Copy Group, you will add your virtual volume from the source array under the Volume Pairs section. Once you select it in the dialog box, you will notice that it is added to the group and the target volume shows a message stating “auto-create”. Click Create or Ok and the changes will be made.

Step 3: Export the volumes from both arrays to the hosts. To do this, you go back to either Virtual Volumes or Virtual Volume Sets in the Main Menu and you choose the Export command to export the volumes to the desired hosts.

This assumes that you’ve already created host records, so if not, you need to create the host records using host persona 11 for VMware or host persona 15 for Windows. In SSMC, you cannot select the host persona directly. Instead, you must choose an operating system from a drop-down menu. You will either choose ESXi 4.x/5.x, Windows 2008/2008 R2 or Windows 2012/2012 R2. The host persona is also displayed after you choose the OS, so you can confirm the setting.

Implementation Guides

For all the detailed configuration and detail about implementing HP 3PAR Peer Persistence, refer to these two guides that outline the specifics for VMware hosta and for Windows hosts:

May 19, 2015 2 comments

Datacenter Software Storage

Using PowerShell to compare a registry key before and after a change

by Philip Sellers April 27, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

So, while deploying IE 11, it became evident that something was happening in the IE settings that affected the display of certain webpages. If we ran an IE Reset in the browser and set all the default settings, the sites would work fine, but after a while a policy or some change was occurring to break websites. It isn’t easy to find the exact setting that is changing, so I thought, PowerShell’s Compare-Object would be great.

In PowerShell, its easy to get a data object that contains all the properties in a particular registry key. To return the IE settings, it is under HKEY_CURRENT_USER in Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer. The PowerShell to get this data is:

[code]

Get-Item ‘HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main’

[/code]

From prior work, I knew I should be able to store this in a variable before and after a change and then compare the two objects. But every time I ran the Compare-Object on the two variables, there were no differences. I even manually changed data in one of the registry properties and got no differences.

What I found is that even though the registry key is stored in a variable, it actually pulls the live data – not a point in time snapshot of the data, as expected.

Instead, I came across an article from Guy Thomas that talked about Compare-Object and the registry and it suggests exporting the registry values to a .reg file before and after the change and then using Compare-Object. This works like a champ. Its a simple comparison of two text documents and makes quick work of what I was trying to accomplish.

The first step is to go into registry editor and use the File > Export command to create the before.reg file. Make sure you export only the select branch of the registry.

[code]

Compare-Object $(Get-Content before.reg) $(Get-Content after.reg)

[/code]

For screenshots and more details, see the post from Guy Thomas.

April 27, 2015 0 comments

Compute Datacenter Storage

Installing Windows 2012 R2 on ProLiant DL380 G7 without SmartStart

by Philip Sellers April 22, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

Since HP SmartStart CD went the way of the dodo bird before Windows 2012 R2 was released, HP ProLiants older than a Gen8 require administrators to manually install Windows 2012 R2. On ProLiant Gen8 and higher, you have Intelligent Provisioning – the replacement for SmartStart – embedded on the system, but this isn’t available on G7, so the user needs to manually install Windows according to the “Implementing Microsoft Windows Server 2012” technical whitepaper.

error

In the case of the HP ProLiant DL380 G7, the normal Windows installation doesn’t recognize the P410i storage controller during installation and it fails with the strange “We can’t create a new partition or locate an existing one.” Searching forums, you find several solutions suggesting boot order or removable mdia like USB or SD storage causes the problem in many cases, but for the DL380 G7, however to get past this on my servers, I needed to download the storage controller driver and add it during installation.

You will need a USB drive where you can load the drivers during Windows installation.

The steps to do this and successfully install Windows 2012 R2 are below:

Browse out to hp.com and go to the Drivers & Software download section or directly to http://www8.hp.com/us/en/drivers.html.
Search for the DL380 G7 in the search and click on the link for the server displayed after search.
Select Windows 2012 R2 as the operating system dropdown.
Navigate to Storage Controller and download the latest “HP ProLiant Smart Array SAS/SATA Controller Driver for Windows Server 2012 x64 Edition.” If you use this link, make sure to check revision history to ensure this is the latest available.
Click the Download button and then run the .exe file. Use the Extract button to copy all the files onto a USB stick.
Boot the system and begin Windows 2012 R2 installation from CD or from ISO connected via remote console on the iLO.
Click the Install Windows.
Custom Installation.
Storage window – choose Have Disk. Make sure USB is plugged in on the server.
Choose the HP driver
Click next and the installation will now continue instead of giving the error.

April 22, 2015 12 comments

Tech Books

Great advice for building a successful IT career

by Philip Sellers April 17, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

<br /> If you’ve spent any time at all in the IT field, you know that there is a lot more than just being skilled with computers needed to be successful in the IT industry. There’s a range of life skills needed that surround your technical competence that will help to make you successful. Author Warren Zabloudil has written a book specifically about developing these skills in yourself. The book is titled Excellence in IT: Achieving Success in an Information Technology Career.

While I don’t get a lot of time to read, when I do make the time it is usually tech related and something that I want to learn. In this case, I’d term this book more personal development than technical skill development. But I’m very glad that I spent the time to read Excellence in IT.

First of all, the book is extremely well written and easy to follow. Just like the principles that Zabloudil explains, the book is well organized and clear. The book is grouped around topics like stress management, understanding end-users, being a good team member, developing your skills and identifying bad habits that are land mines to your career.

I don’t know that I have ever encountered a self-help book that so closely aligned with my personal beliefs. The advice that he shares is much the same as I would share with someone just starting their career in IT. Zabloudil gives great advice in areas like managing stress and workload as an IT worker, which are two areas that can easily overtake the most technically competent individual. And beyond the things I agreed with, I found things that challenged me and my bad habits in my day-to-day job. This book will provoke you to think and hopefully help bring awareness and change to areas to help you succeed.

I’d highly recommend to anyone wanting to polish their skills and excel in a IT career, particularly IT project managers, developers and systems administrators (of course). The book is available on Amazon and is about 150 pages long. It is published by Universal Publishers. Zabloudil is a MCSE and a CNE according to his bio and has over twenty-five years experience as an administrator. He currently works for a Department of Defense think tank.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a copy of the book for review, however, the review is my honest assessment of the book and its contents. In short, I enjoyed the book…

April 17, 2015 0 comments

Datacenter PowerCLI Virtualization

Introducing ‘PowerCLI Cookbook’, the step-by-step guide to adopting PowerCLI

by Philip Sellers April 6, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

If you’ve noticed that my blog posts have been a bit light over the last year, I am happy to finally tell why. Last week, my first book published. It was many months in the making, a lot of effort and it is now in the wild. PowerCLI Cookbook is written to be a guide for beginners to intermediate scripters who want to learn more about PowerCLI. The format is a Packt Publishing Cookbook, which is a step-by-step guide on how to create complex scripts and routines to solve certain problems. Although each recipe solves a specific problem, the recipes also cover ways to explore the PowerCLI objects and discover how to do similar things for other problems.

The real power of PowerCLI comes from the native PowerShell pipeline and well-formed data objects. The book covers both of these to help readers get a handle on how to leverage these features in ways that help create scripts for any purpose administering vSphere and vCloud.

I summed up my whole intent for the book with a tweet this week…

If you’re repeating the same steps in #vSphere more than once, there’s an easier way & #PowerCLI Cookbook shows how http://t.co/E2CVdRpOgx

— Philip Sellers (@pbsellers) April 2, 2015

The book is available from Amazon in print and as a Kindle ebook and is also available from the Packt Publishing website. Packt also has the first chapter available for free as a sample on their website.

Some highlights

Put together an automation script for configuring ESXi hosts
Configure and manage vCenter Server and vSphere clusters
Automate DRS share balancing in clusters
Use and manage vSphere snapshots on virtual machines
Manage DRS affinity group memberships by building custom functions
Auditing vSphere configuration by leveraging native PowerShell commands
Create objects with data for reports and format output
Use VMware Tools and PowerCLI to execute native commands in the VM guest OS
Extend the PowerCLI reach by using ESXCLI objects1
Perform vCloud administration
and much much more…

By the Numbers

247 Pages
77 step-by-step recipes
10 Chapters
9 months, start to finish

April 6, 2015 1 comment