Excellent iSCSI tuning guide lines

http://datacore.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1626/~/sansymphony---iscsi-best-practices

Setting the local to English United Kingdom using PowerShell

Setting the local to English United Kingdom using PowerShell

Set-Culture en-GB

Set-WinSystemLocale en-GB

Set-WinHomeLocation -GeoId 242

Set-WinUserLanguageList en-GB

Resetting lost ESXi password

http://www.top-password.com/knowledge/reset-esxi-root-password.html

Works on ESXi 6.0

If you have access to vCenter..



# Just so it contains one or more VMHost objects.
# To reset all ESXi host passwords use
# $vmhosts = Get-VMHost

Connect-VICenter -Server 

$NewCredential = Get-Credential -UserName "root" -Message "Enter an existing ESXi username (not vCenter), and what you want their password to be reset to."

Foreach ($vmhost in $vmhosts) {
    $esxcli = get-esxcli -vmhost $vmhost -v2 #Gain access to ESXCLI on the host.
    $esxcliargs = $esxcli.system.account.set.CreateArgs() #Get Parameter list (Arguments)
    $esxcliargs.id = $NewCredential.UserName #Specify the user to reset
    $esxcliargs.password = $NewCredential.GetNetworkCredential().Password #Specify the new password
    $esxcliargs.passwordconfirmation = $NewCredential.GetNetworkCredential().Password
    Write-Host ("Resetting password for: " + $vmhost) #Debug line so admin can see what's happening.
    $esxcli.system.account.set.Invoke($esxcliargs) #Run command, if returns "true" it was successful.
}

Removing all the crap from Windows 10

A great write up on how to remove all the detritus Microsoft installs onto Windows 10 OOB

http://mikefrobbins.com/2015/08/20/remove-app-packages-from-windows-10-enterprise-edition/ 

For the device-specific module (DSM) named Microsoft DSM, versions do not match between node

I was asked by a customer to introduce a new Hyper-V 2012 R2 core mode node into an existing cluster.

As always I checked the existing nodes for Windows updates and patched the new node accordingly. The Add node menu item was using in the failover cluster manager and all tests had been selected. Quickly the validation failed with the error below.

Upon closer inspection we can see that the Microsoft DSM version doesn't match! So Windows update was used to check for missing updates, but both nodes showed no updates available.

I used PowerShell to compare the MSDSM.SYS files on both systems, and as we can see below the FilePrivatePart is newer.

I Googled about to find out if there was a hotfix that might have updated the MSDSM.SYS file but no joy.

In the end we narrowed it down to the fact that the March preview update has updated the file. After rolling this out to all cluster nodes the validation passed and the new node was added.

Dell Storage Manager Virtual Appliance - The provided manifest file is invalid

When deploying the Dell Storage Manager Virtual Appliance  DSM VirtualAppliance-16.2.1.228 into a VMware vSphere 6.x platform, you see the error:

The provided manifest file is invalid: Invalid OVF manifest entry:

A work around to this is to download 7 Zip and extract the OVA to c:\Temp folder. Then download the OVAtool from VMware:

 https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/ovf/.

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool>ovftool.exe  "c:\Temp\DSMBuildVM-16.2.1.228.ovf" "c:\Temp\DSMBuildVM-16.2.1.228.ova"

The manifest validates
Opening OVA target: DSM.ova
Writing OVA package: DSM.ova
Transfer Completed
Warning:
 - No manifest entry found for: 'DSMBuildVM-16.2.1.228.ovf'.
 - File is missing from the manifest: 'DSMBuildVM-16.2.1.228.ovf'.

Completed successfully.

Now when you try to deploy the OVA is should go through.

Dell iDRAC virtual media via remote console won't connect with error Channel Access Denied

Connecting the virtual media in a Dell iDRAC remote console fails with the error seen below. We had the latest firmware and tried the ActiveX and HTML5 consoles, but the problem was still there.

After inspecting the SSL certificate you can see that the date is invalid for some reason, we saw this on a new Dell server!

The solution is to reset the SSL certificate on the iDRAC with these commands:

racadm -r 192.168.0.120 -u root -p calvin sslresetcfg


racadm -r 192.168.0.120 -u root -p calvin racreset soft

Don't forget to change the iDRAC IP address, username and password to match your setup.

This process takes about 5-10 minutes to complete.