I came across the following video a few days ago when I was looking at some Hyper-V content. It’s a video by VMware and It shows a side by side install of the new Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2008 and ESX 3.5i. Now the idea here is to show how long it takes to install both, it should be noted though that this video was done before the release of the bare metal Hyper-V server 2008. Having installed both I’d have to say that the ESX 3.5i install was still by far the easiest and quickest to complete. Though Hyper-V Server 2008 (bare metal version) is a lot quicker than the windows representation in the video it is still fiddly and involved amending / shutting down the windows firewall from the command line Urrrghhh!!!
ESX3i Vs Hyper-V Installation - Battle of the Hypervisors
ESX 3.5i, Hyper-V, Microsoft, VMware
ESX 3.5i, esxi, hyper-v, hypervisor
Just had an email from Bluebear pointing me in the direction of the following article, wish I had found that earlier on today, would have saved me loads of time. Hopefully it’ll save someone some time
http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/change_name_and_cert.php
ESX 3.5i, General
Certificates, ESX 3.5i, SSL
Heres an interesting one, I’ve been looking at Bluebear Kodiak and was trying to get round an issue with SSL certificates when I found that my ESX 3.5i server had localhost.localdomain as it’s name on the certificate that’s presented when you connect to the host using internet explorer. How did that happen ????
Well it turns out that if you don’t provide a hostname during the install (which you can’t do in ESX 3.5i) then the certificate is generated based on whatever is in the host file, in this case localhost.localdomain. Now in ESX 3.x the full fat version this was not an issue as the installer asks for the hostname during the install.
How do I fix it ?? Well first of all you need to get on to the console on your esx 3.5i box. But there is no console I hear you cry, well there isn’t really but there is a subset of linux based commands that can be used in what’s known as “Tech support mode”. Everyone should be aware that this is only meant to be used in conjunction with Vmware support and as such is unsupported, see the kb article for details.
To get to it hit Alt +F1 at the console and type unsupported (you won’t see the letters on screen) you’ll need to enter the root password to show that you’ve read the warnings about it being unsupported. See Richard Garsthagen article for more indepth details about how this all works, it’s even got a handy video of how to do it.
Now at this stage you ESX 3.5i box should have been assigned a valid hostname so that the new name and IP have been automatically added in to the hosts file on the server. Once in tech support mode type create_certificates to regenerate the local certificates and then reboot the server for the new certificates to take effect.
To test this has worked you can connect to the host using Internet Explorer and attempt to install the certificate, you should now see the correct hostname appear on that certificate.
This however did not solve my issue with the Bluebear Kodiak software but did teach me something knew. Always look on the bright side I suppose.
ESX 3.5i, General
Certificates, ESX 3.5i, regeneration, SSL
