Month: March 2018

Building a PXE boot environment for ESXi

Rudi Leave a comment

In our environment we run ESXi primarily on HPE Proliant servers. We use OneView for managing the hardware it self (i.e. monitoring, firmware), but for provisioning ESXi to the servers we have been doing some of it manually and some of it with HPE Insight Control Server Provisioning (ICsp).

When preparing for deployment of a new batch of servers we found that Proliant Gen10 servers is not supported by ICsp. Furthermore after an unofficial chat with a HPE employee it seems that it won’t be anytime soon either. There is a new major version of OneView coming, version 4, which has more features and integrations than before, but from the publicly available FAQs I can’t find anything about it supporting OS deployment

With that we decided to look into building a small deployment solution ourselves.… continue reading

Automating iLO config and OneView setup for HPE servers

Rudi 6 Comments

We have quite a few Blade Enclosures with BL460c server blades in them and have been happy with those. For managing these we are primarly using HPE OneView and in some cases the Onboard Administrator (OA).

Our latest batch of new hardware however was DL360 and DL380 rack servers. These will also be managed by OneView primarly, but initially we need to do some iLO config on each server which in the case of blades are done by the OA. They will also have to be added to OneView manually while the blades would be brought in automatically from the chassis.… continue reading

Running Grafana on the Red Hat Openshift Container Platform

Rudi Leave a comment

Last year we started building our own solution for Performance Monitoring of our Infrastructure platform with the focus on the VMware vSphere environment. The components used for this solution is PowerCLI for extracting the metrics, InfluxDB for storing the metrics, and Grafana for presenting the metrics.

I did a Blog series on this project which explains in detail what we did when building the solution.

The solution has been very well received and are used daily by many of my colleagues, and we frequently update the solution with new metrics and dashboards.

In my initial tests before deciding to build the solution with InfluxDB and Grafana I ran these components in Docker containers locally on my laptop.… continue reading

Import-SpbmStoragePolicy error – Object reference not set to an instance of an object

Rudi 2 Comments

In a previous post I’ve talked about issues in the StoragePolicy and Tag cmdlets in PowerCLI. I found a workaround by ignoring certificate warnings and setting my date format to en-US.

Today I tried to replicate some Storage Policies from one vCenter to another and I found that I got new errors…

I can export the policies without issues, but when I try to Import the policy to the new vCenter I get the following error: “Object reference not set to an instance of an object”. Update 2018-04-06: VMware has confirmed the issue and stated it will be fixed in PowerCLI 10.1

I double-checked my workaround found in the mentioned blog post, but that was in place.… continue reading