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Creating a custom HPE Synergy VMware ISO with SSP 2026.01.01 and later

HPE has stopped providing custom images and a vendor add-on depot for Synergy hardware starting with Synergy Service Pack 2026.01.01. You are able to use the HPE OneView plugin for vCenter to manage both drivers and firmware going forward. It sounds like you can generally just use the stock VMware image to initially build servers, but there are some corner cases where you may need an image. Another scenario would be having these drivers in a new VCF deployment before you are able to set up the vCenter plugin. I was able to figure out a process that seems to work well and does not require picking through the SSP to find all of the VIBs. Prerequisites Get SSP URL from lifecycle manager Under the Lifecycle Manager in vCenter, you will see URLs added for the SSPs that have been… Read More »Creating a custom HPE Synergy VMware ISO with SSP 2026.01.01 and later

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