I haven’t had a chance to use this yet, but here’s a Virtual Appliance link to help deploying multiple ESX servers. Here’s a clip from the description: “ESX Deployment Appliance (EDA) is a small and easy to use appliance that makes deploying ESX servers a breeze. It has a very intuitive web-interface that can configure and deploy dozens of ESX servers in minutes.”
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1216
I read about this on Mike Dipetrillo’s blog. I thought it was a great post.
Ever want to setup DR but don’t have a SAN? Well, there’s several ways you can do that. The newest one is to use the EMC Celera Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA). Chad Sakac over at Virtual Geek just published the very thorough (and long) guide on how to set this up. Don’t want to use EMC for some reason? NetApp and LeftHand (now HP) have guides of their own. For NetApp go here. For LeftHand go here.
Just like any other Administrator or Root password, if you forget or lose the Root password of an ESX server, it could be a difficult situation. This section describes how to reset your ESX root password.
In order to reset your root password for an ESX server, you will need to reboot the ESX server and then interrupt the boot up during the GRUB screen. Once you boot up and reach the GRUB screen, Type in: a
This will temporarily modify the boot up parameters.
Once you press the “a” button in the previous step, you will see a screen like the one shown in the screenshot.
Now type in: single and press enter. This will boot up the ESX service console into “Single User” mode which has the full Service Console functionality but does not load the VMKernel.
The service console will boot into single user mode and then will show a root shell prompt.
At the root shell prompt, type in: passwd
This will change the root password to whatever you type in next under “New Unix Password”.
Verify the new password by typing it again. If you get the message “Bad Password: it is based on a dictionary word”, you can either ignore it or select a more complicated root password.
You have now changed the root password.
Now, reboot the ESX server so that it will go through a normal startup and start the VMKernel. You can do this by typing in: shutdown -r now and press enter.
Once you issue the previous command, ESX will now begin the reboot cycle. Once it is rebooted, you can use your new root password for administration.
Welcome to the Lewan Enterprise Systems & Storage Blog! We’ll use this blog to post any useful information we come across regarding Enterprise Systems or Storage. We’ll also use this blog to share technical tips and documents with each other as well as our customers. Thanks for reading and stay tuned as we add content and authors from our team!