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VMDirectPath on Dell PowerEdge Servers with SD card for ESXi
We recently encountered an issue with VMware ESXi USB passthrough that is worth noting. On a Dell PowerEdge R and T series servers (T710, R710, R610, etc) you can opt to install ESXi on the embedded SD card. It works great and allows the OS disk to be completely separate from the datastore disk (which is great if problems arise). If you want to use VMDirectPath for USB passthrough then you need to be aware that one of the EHCI controllers is where the SD card is connected! The same controller that feeds the front 2 USB ports is also attached to the internal USB port on the motherboard and the SD card. If you pass that controller through then 1) the SD card becomes inaccessible to VMware and you will not be able to save any changes on the VMware host, 2) you will not be able to access the /bootbank directory, and 3) if you run “lsusb” you will not see any output.
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GoDaddy won’t issue a UCC cert for a Lync pool with a private domain name
A customer had a Lync 2010 environment with a pool name that used a private domain name and not an FQDN. When we attempted to request a UCC certificate from GoDaddy.com from the CSR generated from the Lync Deplyment Wizard we recieved the error:
You must use a fully-qualified primary domain name for UCC Certificate Request.
We called GoDaddy and according to them there was no way around this. So after attempting to generate a customized CSR with the Request-CsCertificate command without any success, we found how to manually generate a customized CSR using the certreq command.
Convert thick disk to thin on ESXi free
Here are the steps to convert a thick VMDK file to thin. Steps 2-4 are optional, but if you want to shrink it down as small as possible then don’t skip them!
- Evaluate how much space you have on the datastore. You will be creating 2 copies of the .vmdk file before we’re all done, so don’t fill up the datastore and crash all the VMs!
- Within the VM run a defrag of the disk. (this is optional but recommended)
- Download MS Windows Sysinternals ‘SDelete’ exe to the VM: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897443
- Run ‘sdelete -c’ on the the disk. This will zero out unused space.
- Power offthe VM and make a note of what what datastore(s) the virtual disks are on and what they are named.
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Using Cisco 8945 IP phones with CME
We just finished testing the Cisco 8945 IP phone with CME using SCCP and it worked great. Point to point video works flawlessly. A few things to note in setting up these phones:
- Make sure you add the “video” command under telephony-service as well as under the ephone.
- We found that we could not call out our PRI with these phones once video was enabled. We had to add “bearer-cap Speech” under the voice-port to force speech only out the PRI. (The phones were trying to advertise video capabilities out the PRI and our service provider didn’t like that!)
- Although the phones are capable of sending and receiving 640×480 (VGA) video we were noticing that the max we were getting was 325×288 (CIF) resolution. We found that VT Advantage (which is what CME uses) maxes out at CIF resolution per this document.
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CME 8.8 upgrade and Exchange UM voicemail problem
We recently upgraded to the new Cisco CallManager Express (CME) version 8.8 so that we could try out the new 8945 phones for point to point video. Immediately after the upgrade Exchange no longer answered calls to voicemail or auto-attendants and instead gave us a busy signal. In reviewing the Exchange logs I found the following error:
Event ID: 1021
Source: MSExchange Unified Messaging
Task Category: UMCoreThe Unified Messaging server rejected an incoming call with the ID “2ACCC6EF-E2F911E0-9286A0ED-1857E3E@10.1.1.22“. Reason: “The Unified Messaging server received “INVITE” request with an invalid SIP header “USER-AGENT” with value “”.”
Centrally setup Windows XP machines to use the new 2008 Group Policy Preferences
With the new 2008 Group Policy Preferences there are some great new tweak tools to manage without the need for login scripts. Windows XP machines are not compatible with these new GPOs without first installing an update for Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions (CSE). This update is downloadable from Microsoft as an executable via KB943729. Unfortunately Microsoft didn’t package this in a .MSI file so it can’t be deployed through the entire organization via a GP Software Distribution rule. If you have WSUS in place then it can be deployed there, but if not you’ll need to go back to good ol’ login/startup scripts to get this pushed out to all your machines. First some credit to a post over at serverfault.com by Evan Anderson who outlined the strategy. Continue reading →
Public folders and upgrading to Exchange 2010
We recently had some problems with Public folder synchronization during an Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 migration. Public folders were not syncing up to the new Exchange 2010 server with the following error message in the logs:
Event ID: 1020, Source: MSExchange Store Driver. The store driver couldn’t deliver the public folder replication message “Status Request (PublicFolderDatabase@yourdomain.com)” because the following error occurred: The Active Directory user wasn’t found.
Can’t add roles, features and can’t run Windows Update on 2008 R2.
The problem is that Windows Updates will not run properly (giving you various errors) and when Roles or Features are selected under the Server Manager you get the following error:
Error: Cannot display data until your computer is restarted.
Enabling jumbo frames in VMware ESX
To get the best performance out of VMware’s iSCSI initiator it’s a good idea to enable jumbo frames on the ESX hosts. First configure a new vSwitch dedicated to the iSCSI network and if you’re doing this in the GUI delete the default port group that is created.
Handling drive corruption on VMware ESX
Here’s a tip if your ESX host freaks out and you happen to be storing a VMFS partition on the same volume as ESX:
If an “upgrade” install doesn’t fix the problem then do a clean install and on the page that shows how it will cut up the partitions there is a checkbox that says not to touch the existing VMFS partitions on the volume. Leave that checked and then proceed with the install.
![lvm[1]](http://www.asheville-computer-repair.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/lvm1-300x110.jpg "lvm[1]")