Articles In Infrastructure

By Carlo Costanzo, Posted in Infrastructure

Sometimes with VMware solutions, you need to install a custom vSphere Installation Bundle (VIB). There are VIBs for Nvidia GPUs, storage VIBs, and many others. In this post, let’s talk about how you can use Lifecycle Manager to install VIBs, rather than messing around with the Command Line as most of the instructions would have you do. What is a VIB? A VIB is a package containing software that you can install on a VMware ESXi host. It is typically a ZIP file containing the kernel modules, scripts, a... read more.

  • August 16, 2023

By Carlo Costanzo, Posted in Infrastructure, Virtualization

Do you have any Raw Disk Mappings (RDMs) in your environment? If so, you might want to learn more about Clustered VMDKs. Clustered VMDKs vs RDMs Before Clustered VMDKs, clients would have to use RDMs to present a shared disk between VMs. RDMs were basically LUNs passed directly through the ESXi host to the Virtual Machines. The cluster software then handled writes and locking directly with the SAN. You could abstract the interactions a bit more by using Virtual Raw Disk Mappings (vRDMs), but the gist of t... read more.

  • July 27, 2023

By Carlo Costanzo, Posted in Infrastructure, Support

While working on some older DL360’s, I ran into the infamous Purple Screen of Death. Similar to Microsoft’s Blue Screen of Death, this occurs when there is a kernel panic in Linux variants that result in a system halt. This typically is due to a driver issue, hardware issue, or in my case, a recent patch. When I patched the system, the ESXi host restarted as normal, but got stuck on a task appropriately called VMK Shutdown: World_DestroyAllUsersWorlds. The task hung for a few minutes and the... read more.

  • July 07, 2023

By Carlo Costanzo, Posted in Infrastructure

In an article posted last month, Tim Husar demonstrated how to reset an ILO password on a VMware ESXi host without any downtime. Today, I want to show you a different variation of that process, tailored for an older ILO card operating with an earlier version of ESXi. Since we are using tools that are native on the ESXi HPE custom build, depending on which version you are running, you might need to run different tools. In our case, we had an ILO 5 running on a 6.7 ESXi host. We were running through our upgr... read more.

  • June 21, 2023

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure

Citrix continues to innovate their Citrix Cloud platform with new enhancements and capabilities. Here are some highlights of some of the recent new enhancements and capabilities that are now available to the public: Citrix Cloud Now Supports Google Cloud Identity Google Cloud Identity is now supported as an identity provider for subscribers. This provides a unified single sign-on experience to access Citrix Workspace and Google resources. Please note this only works for end-user subscribers, it does not s... read more.

  • June 21, 2023

By Carlo Costanzo, Posted in Infrastructure, Support

The Scene Recently, we were working with a client who was experiencing packet loss on some network adapters on their systems. The ESXi host was set up in a pretty standard configuration of a vSwitch with two physical NICs connected to it. We’d done a lot of troubleshooting up to this point and wanted to start correlating Virtual Machines to pNICs. The NIC teaming on the vSwitch was set up as a default active/active scenario and was using the route by origin method. This means that when a VM powers u... read more.

  • June 02, 2023

By Tim Husar, Posted in Infrastructure, Support

Recently, a client became locked out of the HPE ILO Administrative account on six VMware ESXi hosts. The direct route to fixing this involves downtime, and solutions that could be done while the hosts were online couldn’t be found. We were able to review the HPE REST API documentation and resolve the issue by following the steps below. The HPE ESXi must have been installed or updated with the VMware Custom HPE Software. Enable SSH on the target HPE host. Log into the host with the root account or... read more.

  • May 04, 2023

By Brian Wagner, Posted in Infrastructure, Virtualization

Gotham has been delivering secure applications to client machines for over 20 years. In the past, this was done primarily through local installs, published applications, and virtual desktops. However, the application landscape is changing, and applications are now being delivered from more sources to more destinations. This includes SaaS applications, applications delivered from multiple brokers, multiple operating systems, and policy-based variations of the above scenarios. One example of this change is t... read more.

  • April 24, 2023

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure, Storage, Support

OneDrive is becoming a popular tool to store files as it provides anywhere access and user collaboration. Getting OneDrive to work in VDI can be challenging. Here are some tips and tricks for optimizing OneDrive in VDI: Use Profile Containers – A profile container captures a user’s profile into a virtual disk that is attached to a user’s VDI session. It provides performance that closely matches a local profile with all the benefits of a roaming profile. Using this solution with OneDrive g... read more.

  • March 22, 2023

By Nate Ravid, Posted in Infrastructure

Background A community-based health care system has several pairs of Citrix NetScalers deployed in their environment, which have been running for several years. Recently, a Citrix advisory was issued which required that the firmware be upgraded to avoid a vulnerability which had been discovered. All of the nodes were upgraded to version 12.1-65.25nc. There are several high availability (HA) pairs in deployment, and an orderly upgrade was performed on all pairs. However, after the upgrade, Application Deli... read more.

  • February 03, 2023