Welcome to the blog of mechanised.com

This blog is mainly a technical repository of information on Virtualisation tools and management for our hosting service.

Also for HP's Bladesystem that we use at both our datacentres.

Other articles are also included on .Net development and MS SQL Server as well as other interesting things we come across.

Friday, 18 October 2013

Stop expiring passwords on server core

Nice easy one, at command line enter this to stop any accounts from expiring their passwords:

NET accounts /MAXPWAGE:UNLIMITED

Thursday, 10 October 2013

Extending root RHEL physical partition and then the underlying LV

Bit fiddly this so reminder to myself:
  • Boot into rescue mode from install DVD
  • delete partition with fdisk 
  • recreate at same start to end of disk
  • reboot
  • back into rescue
  • Then run these commands
pvresize /dev/sda2 (or 2nd partition on physical disk)
lvextend /dev/mapper/*vg_lv* -l+100%FREE (for all the disk)
resize2fs /dev/mapper/*vg_lv* (to resize FS, may take a short while)
  • Check volumes are ok with vgs/lvs
  • Reboot to double check everything boots and mounts fine

Monday, 12 August 2013

PowerCLI Script to automatically setup vCenter 5.1 Alarm Email Notification

http://fixingitpro.com/2012/07/09/powercli-script-to-automatically-setup-vcenter-alarm-email-notification/

With versions for 5.0 and 5.1.

Wednesday, 29 May 2013

How to reduce Server 2008 R2 x64 winsxs folder

dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded

This freed up about 4GB on the system drive, server was upgraded to SP1 so it removed plenty of pre-SP1 files.


Thursday, 9 May 2013

Get remote HP Server serial and product number

Couple of quick powershell commands will get you what you need:

Product number
gwmi win32_ComputerSystem | select OEMStringArray

Serial number
gwmi win32_bios | select SerialNumber 

Wednesday, 16 January 2013

Manually patching vSphere 5.0 free edition

As the free edition can't use update manager a quick and easy way to patch a single host is to download the latest patch from VMWare and upload to an accessible datastore then put the host into maintenance mode.
http://www.vmware.com/patchmgr/findPatch.portal
Then enable SSH on the host, login and run:
esxcli software vib install -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore/patchfile.zip
It'll take a while and you should get results that say it's all been sucessful and you need to reboot.