I’ve been covering a few workarounds, mishaps and random things I’ve had to do during a recent vSphere 5.5 U2 deployment. This is Part 4 in the series, and I hope some of it is useful. You can read my other posts here, here, and here.
Client Integration Plug-in for vSphere Web Client
Love it or hate it, the vSphere Web Client is here to stay. If, for some reason, you’re logged into a host with credentials that you want to use to log in to your vSphere environment with, you can use pass-through authentication if you install the Client Integration Plug-in for vSphere Web Client. You can get details on how to do that here.
HP Legacy BIOS Mode and ESXi
This was my first time using BL460c Generation 9 blades with ESXi. While I’ve been around the block with HP blades in the past, I’ve never used them with the SD card option before. I thought this was to blame when I’d reboot the hosts and configuration items (such as persistent scratch location, syslog configuration and core dump details) would disappear. Added to this, the networking configuration on vmk0 would disappear from time to time as well. I was also getting errors such as this when applying host profiles to hosts:
“Call “HostProfileManager.GenerateConfigTaskList” for object “HostProfileManager” on vCenter Server “hostname.domain” failed.
Failed to execute command to configure or query coredump partition.”
I did some searching and chanced upon this article BL460c Gen9 + ESXi 5.5 – Special procedure when using UEFI? Seems that setting the host’s Boot Mode to Legacy BIOS Mode makes for a happier installation and on-going experience. The guy who installed the blades had set them to Legacy mode for the installation and then set them back to UEFI. I can’t tell you why this needed to occur, nor can I tell you the disadvantages of taking this approach.
Windows 2012 R2 and .Net 3.5
If you’re running your VMware applications on Windows 2012 R2, there’s a chance you’ll need to install .Net 3.5 on your guest to get things working. This is handled via Server Roles. Microsoft has a TechNet article on how to do it here. Note that you’ll need your Windows installation media, and you’ll likely need to specify an alternate source – %CDROM%\sources\sxs.
Okay, so hopefully that was useful for someone. More to follow …