Silent install of VMWare Tools under a Windows guest

bvoss — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 20:37:51 +0000

In vCenter Server, right-click on a virtual machine, click Guest | Install/Upgrade VMware Tools, and enter "/S /v /qn REBOOT=R" in the Advanced field. Reboot will be supressed.

Big Data

bvoss — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 22:43:35 +0000

I just added another 15 terabytes of disk to one of the SANs at work that I manage. Woohoo! Always fun dealing with lots of storage. Now off to provision some new datastores for VMWare ESX.

Clariion hosts showing as unmanaged

bvoss — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:32:59 +0000

I have had several Windows servers connected to an EMC Clariion SAN via both Fibre Channel & iSCSI show up as unmanaged, even though they all have Navisphere Agent installed and running. After some investigation, I found that all of the hosts have multiple NICs, either for cluster heartbeat purposes or for iSCSI connectivity. In Navisphere, right-clicking the host and choosing "Update Now" gave an error which included the IP of one of the private interfaces. In other words, the agent is binding to the wrong adapter.

Solution:

Create a file named "agentid.txt" under the Navisphere Agent directory.
The first line of the file should contain the server's fully-qualified hostname.
The second line should contain the IP address that Navisphere should use to contact the server. This determines which adapter will be used.
Stop/start Navisphere Agent service. Do not restart the service, as that doesn't seem to work.

In Navisphere, right-click on the host and click "Update Now". It should show up as managed.

BVLog » san

Silent install of VMWare Tools under a Windows guest

Big Data

Clariion hosts showing as unmanaged