It’s a common practice to replace self-signed certificates, that are used in several VMware products, with CA signed certificates. I did this in my lab for my vCenter Server Appliance and my VMware Update Manager. While I was working with vRealize Orchestrator I noticed, that it is also using self-signed certificates (what else?). For completeness, I decided to replace the self-signed certificates with CA signed.
My lab environment VMware vSphere 5.
I use Microsofts Deployment Toolkit (MDT) in my lab to deploy Windows VMs with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2012. I described the installation and configuration of MDT in a small blog post series. Take a look into the intro post, if you’re a new to MDT. But the OS installation isn’t the time consuming part of a deployment: It’s the installation of patches. Because of this, I decided to automate the patch installation and make it part of the OS installation.
Some weeks ago, Frank Denneman wrote a short blog post about accessing his Supermicro IPMI with SSH. He used this access to power on his lab servers.I don’t use Supermicro boards in my lab, but I have four HP ProLiants with iLO and iLO has a also a SSH interface. This way to power on my servers seemed very practical, especially because the iLO web interface isn’t the fastest. But I wanted it a bit more automated, so I decided to use Plink to send commands via SSH.
The PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) is a very handy application when dealing with the PowerShell. And because of this, the ISE is also a very handy application when dealing with VMware PowerCLI. When I write a script or a one-liner, one of the first things I do is to load the necessary snap-ins. And because I’m lazy, I’m trying to automate everything, what I have to do more than once.
Today I found this neat PowerCLI One-liner in my Twitter timeline:
PowerCLI Einzeiler um den Adapter-Typ einer VM auf Vmxnet3 zu ändern: Get-VM YOUR-VM |Get-NetworkAdapter |Set-NetworkAdapter -Type "Vmxnet3"
— T. Scheller (@bones44) February 28, 2014 A nice side effect of this one-liner is, that the mac-address doesn’t change, as you can see in the screenshots.
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
If you have ever changed the adapter type of a vNIC you will know, that this leads to a changed mac-address and a new adapter in the OS.
In part I and part II of this series I showed how to install the WDS role, MDT 2013 and ADK for Windows 8.1. I showed the process to import the OS images and the necessary drivers for our deployment. Now it’s time to bring MDT to life. Let’s start with part III of this series.
User for deployment share access During the deployment process Windows PE needs access to the deployment share.
After installing the required software, we need to configure MDT 2013. You need:
Windows Server 2008 R2 ISO VMware Tools for Windows ISO or a Server with VMware Tools installed The deployment share First of all we have to create a deployment share. This file share is used to access the software, drivers etc. during the deployment phase. Just start the Deployment Workbench, that can be found in the start menu.
Usually you can install virtual servers on four different ways:
Installation from scratch image-based installations (e.g. Clonezilla) VMware templates and template customization specifications automated deployment Except VMware templates you can use every technique to deploy physical and virtual servers. I would like to show you how you can install windows-based VMs with Microsofts Deployment Toolkit 2013 (MDT 2013). There are three articles in this series. The first article describes what you need for MDT 2013 and how you install WDS.
What are the requirements of MDT 2013? The requirements are manageable. To recreate my small lab environment, you need two VMs or physical servers and a evaluation copy of Windows 2008 R2. MDT 2013 and ADK for Windows 8.1 can be downloaded for free on microsoft.com. I used two Windows 2008 R2 VMs for my setup. One VM as a Domain Controller with DHCP and the second VM for MDT 2013 and WDS.
In November 2013 I published a PowerShell script on blazilla.de that creates a backup of your SANsymphony-V config by using the DataCore SANsymphony-V PowerShell cmdlets. I would like to thank Marcel, Michael and Frank for their feedback and comments to improve the script. The password is stored in the securestring.txt that needs to be stored in the same directory as the script. Kudos to Marcel, who has the part of the script contributed, that stores the password in an encrypted file.
