Razor is a cool new deployment tool for your entire server infrastructure. It's has been and is still being developed as a joint venture between EMC and Puppetlabs (who also make the amazing open source application automation tool Puppet), with the constant influx of code from other open source aficionados as well. For those interested in what, why and how Razor can be used I'd gladly point your here: what, why and how. During the last two months I've been spending a lot of time on lab … [Read more...]
Upgrading All Firmware on your Iomega IX2 or IX4 NAS Device
I’ve been running an Iomega IX4 in my home vSphere lab 24x7 for the past two years and have found it to be a nice reliable NAS device. Though like with anything regular maintenance is required whether this be removing the dust or fluff from the fan at the back or keeping the firmware up-to-date. The latter being the topic of this blog post. The Iomega IX2 or IX4 NAS has two parts to it than can have firmware revisions applying to it. The first is the most obvious and is for … [Read more...]
VMware vSphere Error – Initializer for VirtualInfrastructure.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy’ threw an exception
Hey TechHeads! Here’s an important vSphere issue that may potentially impact the management of your production or lab vSphere environment. The ‘issue’ is caused by a recent Microsoft .NET patch update which can cause your pre-Update 1 vSphere Client to give the error message: “ Error parsing the server "<servername>" "clients.xml" file. The type initializer for VirtualInfrastructure.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy' threw an exception. “ VMware have released … [Read more...]
VMware ESXi Purple Screen of Death on HP Proliant ML110 or ML115
A common occurrence discovered by HP Proliant ML110 and ML115 owners when having installed the HP version of VMware ESXi containing the management agents is a Purple Screen of Death (PSoD) after about 2 minutes of the ESXi host being up and running. The following video demonstrates this: The reason this occurs is that ESXi loads the HP CIM (Common Information Model) agents which then subsequently crashes ESXi if particular hardware is not found. Needless to … [Read more...]