Updating appliance VMs can be a bit of daunting process since they are all usually different. vROPS (VMware vRealize Operations) is no different in that regard, but it’s a quite straightforward operation when you get understand the process.
Sometimes you just can’t catch a break, for example after returning from a vacation and not remembering your password for the built-in Administrator account in the vsphere.local domain for vCenter. Changing it can be a bit round-about at times, so I decided to do a small guide since I had to figure it out myself recently.
Virtualizing NTP servers has been quite a hot topic for some time, but regardless of what some people say, you can actually virtualize NTP servers, as long as you know what you’re doing. If you examine some public NTP servers more closely, you’ll actually find that a lot of them are running on AWS, which should attest to virtualizing being a possible route to go down.
There’s some things though that you might want to consider before going down this route, and some special configurations you need to do to make sure everything works as intended.
After a couple of years in the IT infrastructure world, you’ll be faced with the greatest task of all, updating servers every month or so. This has always been the most brain dead task imaginable, but now with virtualization, we also have 10 times more servers to update. And almost every single week there’s another critical bug in some core service that has to be patched in panic.
So, instead of doing all that, why don’t we just do what we always do when we have a task that humans don’t like to do? We get a computer to do it for us!
Updating appliance VMs can be a bit of daunting process since they are all usually different. vROPS (VMware vRealize Operations) is no different in that regard, but it’s a quite straightforward operation when you get understand the process.
As everybody knows, console cables and their corresponding interfaces are a scourge on a network administrators existence. They are always too short, COM-ports get renumbered, Baud-rates are unknown, etc. By their very nature, you also have to be physically present in the vicinity of the box you’re trying to configure. Today we’re going to change all that, by constructing a wireless console cable adaptor with almost infinite range.
I can almost here people shouting something about SSH and Telnet to their screens, as well as something about the Airconsole. First and foremost, telnet and SSH are both wonderful, after you’ve configured the device, but for initial setup, they sadly can’t be used. Airconsole is quite nice, and I use it almost daily, but it’s useful when you want to sit somewhere comfortable when configuring a device in the same room as you, not so much when you want to be comfortable on a beach half a world away from the offending device.
This we’re going to change today, with one device, the B+B SmartFlex router.
If you haven’t noticed already, I have something of a thing for everything time synchronization related. “Proper”, exact time is something that I find important, it’s probably OCD related.
As a part of my day job, I manage a quite large network, with hundreds of different devices. And all of these require some method to synchronize their clocks. Anyone who has at some point tried to diagnose a network problem knows how absolutely critical it is to have proper time available at the devices, so that you for example have any chance to compare logs etc.
