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Virtualization

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 futurešŸ˜Š). 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

Deploying MySQL on Oracle Clusterware – Part 5

Installing MySQL There are a few ways to get the MySQL software set up for clustering.  One option is to install the rpm for MySQL on both cluster nodes.  There is also a tar file containing what you need to create a yum repository that can be used by multiple servers.  You could also use a tar of the software and just extract it to a shared filesystem.  The benefit of the last option is that you can have multiple instances of MySQL hosted on the same cluster running different versions. I decided to have MySQL 5.7 installed from a yum repository, but also have a MySQL 5.6 home extracted from a tar in case you needed to run an older version concurrently. At the time of writing, I used the following patches from MOS as they had the latest versions of… Read More »Deploying MySQL on Oracle Clusterware – Part 5

Installing Qubes OS 3.2 on a HP Zbook Studio G3

I recently got a demo unit of an HP Zbook Studio G3 to play with.  It is a tricked out one with a 4k display and a NVMe drive.  I wanted to try out Qubes OS on it, but the installer would lock up when I tried to boot it. Getting Qubes to install and boot The rough steps for getting a HP Zbook Studio G3 to install Qubes OS 3.2 are: Get a copy of the Qubes OS 3.2 ISO Write the ISO to a USB Drive Mount the EFI boot partition of the USB drive Windows will automatically mount it if you plug in the USB drive – a Mac won’t recognize it at all Modify the EFI/BOOT/xen.cfg file so that all of the kernel lines containĀ acpi_osi=! acpi_osi=”Windows 2009″ I found this useful tip on the ArchWiki Disable Secure Boot… Read More »Installing Qubes OS 3.2 on a HP Zbook Studio G3