Recently I did a “few” upgrades to the home lab. Besides an upgrade to enhance shared storage for vSphere (my old NAS was at 502 days uptime), I took the opportunity to enable jumbo packets on my Dell PowerConnect 5324 and the new fire-and-forget Thecus N7700PRO NAS. As the basis for new lab infrastructure to test VMware, Hyper-V and Xen, it’s a good improvement.
Since the first use was to test some of the new features of vSphere / vCenter 4.1, I also took the opportunity to change over to ESXi from ESX. According to VMware, 4.1 is the last release of ESX, so time to get cracking with ESXi, vMA, and the differences in managing the hosts.
I wanted to take advantage of jumbo frames on my ESXi systems. However, I didn’t decide this until I’d already installed the hosts (and didn’t see an advanced option to set the management interface MTU).
Continue reading ESXi 4.1 and the 9000 Byte MTU (on vmk0)
This is an update post to reflect the differences in vCenter 4.1 vs the older vCenter 25 install. The older post can be found here.
Certain third party products such as XenDesktop respect the expiration date on the vCenter SSL certificate. The vSphere Client doesn’t mind so much, nor it appears do the vSphere (ESX/ESXi — err vSphere Hypervisor) hosts, but when your VDIs suddenly can’t be reached, it’s a bad thing. I’m sure other products may have the same issue.
By default, vCenter will create a self-signed certificate issued to “VMware default certificate“. Unlike previous vCenter installs, the certificate is valid for 10 years, but still can cause problems for third parties that want to see the proper common name (e.g., FQDN of the vCenter server).
In our case, since we’re not publishing any SSL services to the public and already have a Microsoft Certificate Authority, we can create and sign our own vCenter certificate. And just like the newer version of vCenter, we’ll set it up for 10 years too.
This can be completed in just under 15 minutes if all the prerequisites are in place. Took me an hour (including this documentation).
Continue reading Replacing vCenter 4.1 SSL Certificate with Active Directory Issued One
