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Enabling hidden BIOS settings on the Quanta T22HF-1U

I picked up a Quanta T22HF-1U to mess around with for VMware Cloud Foundation. CraftComputing did some videos about it and posted some documentation and firmware. One thing to note that is not discussed in the videos is that it is possible to get into the web interface of the BMC and use the KVM and media redirection. The default username is admin and the password is cmb9.admin. I was able to put the systems in UEFI mode and install vSphere 8 Update 3 via the BMC without issue. I picked up a couple used Oracle Flash Accelerator F160 PCIe Cards (aka Intel SSD DC P3605). They fit just fine in the half-height PCIe slot of each blade. Unfortunately, the systems would not boot with the cards installed. The system would hard lock and I’d have to use the power button or BMC… Read More »Enabling hidden BIOS settings on the Quanta T22HF-1U

Reset Dell OpenManage Enterprise admin password

The default admin account on Dell OpenManage Enterprise is the only account that has the “Backup Administrator” role assigned to it and is needed to perform a migration from 3.x to 4.x. If the password is lost, the documentation states there is no way to recover it. If you log in with a regular Administrator account you cannot edit the admin account in the GUI. It is however possible to reset the Dell OpenManage Enterprise admin account password via the API. First, you’ll need to perform a GET request against the /api/AccountService/Accounts endpoint to find the ID of the admin account. The @odata.id field contains the full endpoint of the account. Yes, the URI is really in that weird format of /api/AccountService/Accounts(‘XXXXX’). You can make a PUT request against this endpoint and reset the password. I copied the entire body… Read More »Reset Dell OpenManage Enterprise admin password

Recover NSX Manager Backup Passphrase

I managed to break our test environment trying to update some internal certificates that were close to expiration. I attempted to restore a NSX Manager backup and discovered that the backup passphrase that I had saved was not correct. I could not for the life of me find any documentation on how one might recover a lost NSX Manager backup passphrase. Luckily for me, I was able to log in to the broken manager and not yet deleted it. I did some digging and thanks to this blog post by Tony Williamson, I was able to figure out that I could get the current backup configuration with the root user on the NSX Manager with this command: /opt/vmware/bin/corfu_tool_runner.py -o showTable -n nsx -t BackupConfig. Also note that certain special characters in the backup passphrase might appear as escaped UTF characters… Read More »Recover NSX Manager Backup Passphrase

Add NSX-T Tags with PowerCLI

I don’t think the NSX-T PowerCLI module operates intuitively compared to most PowerShell modules I have worked with. It took me a while to figure out how to add NSX-T tags to a virtual machine with PowerCLI. I had to piece together Information from the documentation and various forums. I’ve put some notes here to help others (and remind myself in the future😊). Assuming you have done a Connect-VIServer  and a Connect-NsxtServer something like this should let you add tags to a VM easily. And that’s all there is to it to add NSX-T Tags with PowerCLI. Once you have an understanding of this basic functionality, it becomes much easier to do a mass add of multiple tags to multiple machines with a foreach. Also, note that $vmservice.addtags will only add the tags you specify. It should not impact any… Read More »Add NSX-T Tags with PowerCLI

Deploy vCenter Server Appliance with Terraform

I’m a big fan of William Lam’s scripts to deploy nested vSphere lab environments. A few months ago, he published a script for vSphere 7.0 that deploys the usual suspects. It also deploys vSphere with Kubernetes. I’ve always wanted to see if I could build something similar using Terraform. I think it would be awesome to run a terraform apply and go from an OVA file to a fully deployed vCenter. I’ve messed around with this in the past. I even fixed a bug that made the VCSA as well as William’s Nested ESXi Appliances undeployable. Without any hacks you could deploy a VCSA and get it online enough for network connectivity. Due to limitations, you would have to manually configure the VCSA from the VAMI interface. As another option, you could manually edit the VCSA OVF file and change… Read More »Deploy vCenter Server Appliance with Terraform