Windows Server Core Expand Volume

I am trying to run as many of my Windows server home lab virtual machines (VM) as Core installs. This reduces the resource requirement for each VM in terms of drive space, memory and CPU – obviously a good thing in any environment. It also forces me to learn more ways of dealing with situations, … Read more

Kali Linux Open-VM-Tools Autostart

I have a Kali Linux virtual machine with the open-vm-tools package installed. Unfortunately the service did not setup to autostart on boot. This of course means I don’t benefit from the enhancements and functionality provided by the tools.   Check Service Status To check whether the service is running we can leverage the service command … Read more

VMware ESXi Embedded Host Client Installation

Today I’m going to install the VMware ESXi Embedded Host Client software on one of my Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T lab servers. This is a VMware fling I’ve kept an eye on since it’s first release and much as I would like to see it on our production systems it isn’t’ something we have signed off on … Read more

Configure Cisco SG300 Switch Layer 3 Mode

The Cisco SG300 switch series can act as a standard layer 2 switch or be enabled for layer 3 functionality. Typically the switch will come in layer 2 mode (also called switch mode in the CLI). There are a couple of ways layer 3 functionality can be enabled and I will demonstrate them both below. … Read more

HPE 3PAR Interrupt Coalescing

I’m currently working on a case with HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) 3PAR support with regard to excessive retransmit errors on our Remote Copy Fibre Channel (RCFC) connection between two 7400 arrays. While troubleshooting we found that a required option was not set appropriately – namely interrupt coalescing on the RCFC ports. In this post I … Read more

PowerShell Direct over Hyper-V VMBus

Today I learnt a little about an awesome feature which I think isn’t that well known – or at least when I speak to colleagues past and present they are not familiar with it. The feature in question is leveraging PowerShell on a Hyper-V host down the VMBus to a guest virtual machine. What exactly … Read more

HPE CLX Error – Socket connection timed out to port 2550

This week I came across an interesting problem on one of our Microsoft Failover Clusters (FOC) which utilises the HPE Cluster Extensions (CLX) software to  provide failover support with our HPE 3PAR arrays. A couple of roles within one FOC showed the CLX resource as failed with everything else still showing as online. We were … Read more

HPE 3PAR SSH Key Authentication

Passwords are not going to vanish any time soon but there are better ways of authenticating to a system both in terms of convenience and security. HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) 3PAR arrays support the use of SSH keys for authentication and this post will discuss their setup and use.   What are SSH keys? SSH … Read more

Microsoft Cluster Shared Volume Caching

I recently learned of a feature which had previously been unknown to me – Microsoft Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) caching. I use both Hyper-V and VMware at work though typically I focus on VMware as that is where the majority of our environment runs. I am deploying more systems to Hyper-V every day and the … Read more