Recently, I had to rebuild my proxmox cluster after a disk failure. Against all advice, I installed Proxmox on USB keys. It worked well for ESX so I thought I could get away with it with Proxmox, but alas. Both of my nodes failed after a few months. Rebuilding the cluster was easier than I expected, but probably …

I wanted to blog about this because I couldn't find any info about it on the internet. Against the advice of everyone, I installed Proxmox on a USB thumbdrive. And, as predicted by everyone who gave that advice, the thumbdrive failed after a couple months. So I rebuilt my server with a new 1TB SSD disk and a backup of …

Recently, while exploring Chef's platform for "Compliance as Code" called InSpec, I ran into an issue when executing VMware's DISA STIG profile against a VMware host. Sorry, we are unable to detect your platform Train::PlatformDetectionFailed After connecting to my test vCenter server, I quickly realized why: …

Two of my SQL Servers stopped working after an unexpected power outage. When I attempted to start them, they gave me an Access Denied error. These are two totally different machines (diff Win & diff SQL version) that both, after years of working, just stopped in their tracks with an Access Denied. This isn't an …

I'm not super familiar with ThinApping, but converted portions of this VMware login script at the request of a consultant. I tried to automate the script a bit more than the one from VMware's blog. Their script required that you put in the path to each EXE. This script will find all exes within a directory and register …

I'm currently reading VMware vSphere Design and found a super useful tip: you can find a centralized list of config and log files for ESX. This page, located at https://youresxhost/host, shows a whole lot of stuff, from your license keys, to your SSL certs to log files and more. Note that it does require …

After speaking with a colleague today, I expect this list will grow as I work more with the vSphere suite. But until then, here is a consolidated list of posts and scripts that I've written to ease the replacement of SSL certificates on Windows-based vSphere related products using PowerShell and a Windows Domain …

Well, this script was different. Unlike the other posts in this series, I was required to use only Microsoft command line tools instead of OpenSSL. Not that I'm opposed to using certreq and certutil -- I actually started this whole cert automation project to see if it was possible to use only these tools and …

Next in the series of replacing vSphere related SSL scripts is the VMware Site Recovery manager script. This script generates the SSL certificates based off of the WebServer Certificate Template and runs a batch file to perform the actual replacement. …

Next in the series of replacing vSphere related SSL scripts is the VMware View Composer script. This one is rather simple, and uses certutil and certreq to generate the certificates, as opposed to OpenSSL. It also generates a batch script which calls SviConfig.exe. You just gotta put in a few variables, run the script …