Author Archives: Jeremy Waldrop
ESXi 4.1 to 5 Upgrades with VUM
I have been doing a lot of ESXi 4.1 to 5 upgrades of late and every time I tried using vCenter Update Manager I would get an incompatible driver warning for these 2 ESXi 4.1 driver packages oem-vmware-esx-drivers-scsi-3w-9xxx oem-vmware-esx-drivers-net-vxge The … Continue reading →
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Cisco UCS PowerShell Configuration Script
As a follow up from yesterday’s post (UCS PowerShell Health check HTML report) I figured I would post a video demonstrating a UCS configuration script that I just finished. The video starts with me showing an un-configured UCS cluster, I … Continue reading →
Cisco UCS PowerShell Health Check Report
I have been slack on my blog posts of late, mostly because of motivation but I have also been very busy with very little free time to spare. I like being busy and I have been working on some cool … Continue reading →
Nexus 1000v 1.5 Upgrade
I just upgraded our lab Nexus 1000v from 1.4 to 1.5. Before the upgrade I assumed that it be like the upgrade from 1.3 to 1.4 where you first had to upgrade the VEM modules on each ESX host and … Continue reading →
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Cisco UCS 6248 Unified Port Configuration
One of the exciting new updates from Cisco recently is the 2nd generation UCS hardware. UCS gen 2 hardware included updated: Fabric Interconnect – 6248s Fabric Extender – 2208 Mezzanine Adapter – VIC 1280 For details on the new hardware … Continue reading →
Cisco Nexus 5000/7000 FEX Topologies
There seems to be some confusion on what the supported Nexus 7000/5000 FEX topologies are. The first section deals with the supported Nexus 5000/5500 FEX topologies. The next section will show the Nexus 7000 FEX topologies. The following topologies are … Continue reading →
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Cisco Nexus 7000 I/O Module Cheat Sheet
I created this post to help me remember the different Nexus 7000 I/O modules and their capabilities/features. There are 2 classes of I/O Modules for the Nexus 7000; M-Series and F-Series. Below is a list of the modules and their … Continue reading →
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Cisco UCS Firmware Update vs Activate
One of the questions that a lot of our UCS customers ask us is “What is the difference between Update Firmware and Active Firmware?” Update vs Activate – On the firmware management tab in UCS Manager there are 2 operations; … Continue reading →
VMware SRM Testing on Cisco UCS with Routing
I work for a Cisco/EMC/VMware VAR named Varrow and we do a fair amount of VMware SRM projects. One of the challenges we face in doing SRM failover testing is being able to route between VMs that are brought up … Continue reading →
Cisco UCS 1.4 Post Upgrade Warnings
After upgrading our UCS lab to 1.4 all of my Service Profiles and Service Profile Templates were in a warning state with blue boxes around them. There wasn’t an outage and all of our blades were still functioning. The warnings … Continue reading →
Cisco UCS Firmware 1.4
I have to say now that I have had a chance to implement Cisco UCS firmware 1.4 and look at the new features I am blown away. Cisco should have made this version 2.0. Here is a list of my … Continue reading →
Cisco UCS Service Profile Coolness
Last week I did a Cisco UCS project that included building out a new VMware vSphere ESXi 4.1 cluster using the new UCS blades. Now that ESXi boot from SAN is supported we used 5GB boot LUNs for the install. … Continue reading →
VMware vCenter 4.1 Upgrade/Migration Gotchas
I have recently been doing vCenter 2.5/4.0 to vCenter 4.1 upgrades and migrations for our clients. Upgrades to 4.1 have been more difficult than doing upgrades to 4.0 because vCenter 4.1 requires an x64 version of Windows. Most of our … Continue reading →
Sample script for automating the installation of ESXi 4.1 on Cisco UCS with UDA
Thanks to Mike Laverick the Ultimate Deployment Appliance now supports ESXi 4.1. – http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/vmware-content/ultimate-da/ I developed a script for automating the installation of ESXi 4.1 on Cisco UCS boot from SAN. The UDA template I setup uses a subtemplate for … Continue reading 
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Custom ESXi 5 ISO for UCS, Nexus 1000v and PowerPath VE