We really had a good experience at the event yesterday in Singapore and credit to the organizer, sponsors, speakers and those who participated and make this event smooth and successful. Without doubt this was the biggest VMware event’s  I’ve had attended so far since I have started with VMware 4 years ago. Those who had attended VMware Technology Day & VMware Partner Connexions which held in Malaysia before, you should not miss this event next year. There were so much useful information (business & technical) have been shared during this event although I would say, 80% of it is not new to me

The MC gave his best shot, Ed Lenta (GM-South East) with his nice speech. Paul Maritz (VMware CEO) presented with his big idea (mobile virtualization). Raghu Raguram covered very well with introduction of vCloud, vCenter operation, vFabric & Gemfire and VMware View. Edward Chew did a vCould director Demo. Poh Wah Lee with his vCenter Operation Demo. David Wakeman View Demo. Andrew Dutton (Asia Pacific) with his short but very useful presentation and last but not least, Paul who did well with his White Boarding (Public Computing) presentation.

p/s : There is no Q & A session though…

Everyone have to admit, upgrading VMware Tools is a rather simple task. Over the time, my past successful rate when upgrading VMware Tools was never disappointed me. But when you caught into trouble while upgrading it, it can be very troublesome. Since there are so much article about VMware Tools you can find elsewhere, it was never in my intention to share with you on how-to troubleshoot VMware Tools here. This is something which everyone know and can do most even for a newbie. But sometime things cat get crazy and will not according to our plan. Things which I’ve already done it a hundred times before and should be pretty straight somehow turns to a nightmare. The worse part is, we never prepare for it. Who knows, after we upgraded the tools and then we found out :-

• IP setting changed to dynamic,
• Windows Domain authentication failed,
• Administrator forgot local password

Believe it or not, those three issues that I’ve listed above really happened to me one after another. I have no idea why the three (out of forty) VMs IP setting suddenly changed to dynamic. It can be due to a hidden device (HP NIC) which still remain inside the VM and caused a driver conflict. No available DHCP server causing administrator failed to login to these VMs via Windows domain. Our last choice is to reconfigure back the VM using original IP via Windows local account. Unfortunately, local administrator account has been locked and what make me and my colleague(Nick) felt shocked was, my customer even forgot username and password for the other account. To cut long stroy short, finally we managed to reconfigure the static IP by unlocked the local account(thanks Pogostick). Like I said, the task is rather simple but somehow it took 2 hours for us to resolved the issue.  . So be prepared and indeed, this is a good lesson to be learned.

ariyossss

Well, this card really gave me some headache while I’m installing vSphere 4.1 on my customer new BL465c G7. First, you need to download the driver from VMware driver & tools download here and install it manually. Else, ONLY HP NC card will be detected by your ESX/i host.

Second, as per advised by HP, please load the driver during ESX/i installation (Load custom driver). Otherwise, your Emulex card may not be read by ESX/i in the correct order. This what was happened to me when I installed it by using “esxupdate”. Although, both cards (Emulex & HP NC) show as connected and Emulex card can work as expected, but no connection is possible for my HP NC card.

Supposedly from vSphere client you should get :-

Emulex 10GbE :

• vmnic0
• vmnic1

HP NC 1GbE

• vmnic2
• vmnic3

For those who installed the driver by using “esxupdate” command, your card order may oppose with what I have above. To fix that without another re-installation, what you need to do is:

• Enter your host into “maintenance mode”
• Upload the .iso driver to your ESX/i host
• Mount it $mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
• Go to directory $cd /mnt/cdrom/
• Install the driver $esxupdate –bundle=SV-Emulex-xx.xx.zip update
• Reboot the server $reboot

Change your vmnic order in “esx.conf” $vi /etc/vmware/esx.conf and $reboot once more

• 00:00:4…. vmnic0
• 00:00:4…. vmnic1
• 00:00:8…. vmnic2
• 00:00:8…. vmnic3

ariyosss