Thursday, May 24, 2018

Removing Modern Apps from Win10 Gold Image

You are creating a gold image. You are disconnected from the internet. You want to get rid of all the non-corporatte, interent grabbing apps on there.

I looked at this post https://gal.vin/2017/04/06/removing-uwp-apps-mdt/

And found some great tips. Look at the list of apps that can not be removed. You desperately want to, but don't be fooled.

I added an out-gridview command to mine.

Get-AppxPackage -allusers | out-gridView -Mode Multiple | remove-AppxPackage
It simplifies the whole script. Since you know the App name is valid, no error checking is needed.

Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online | Out-GridView -Mode Multiple | Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online

And the same for the Provisioned Packages.

Remove snapshots on vCenter easily

If you have a bunch of snapshots all over your environment and you need to pick only a few to remove, here's an easy way.

I was looking through some posts and found this to get started. http://pipe2text.com/?page_id=251

I modified it a bit to get the items I needed.

We had an issue where the NetApp snap manager process failed and stayed in the event log at 44% or 59%. Rebooting the vCenter server worked, but we were left with smvi_ snapshots all over the place.

$snaps = get-vm svr-00* | get-snapshot | where {$_.descrption -like "*201804*" | select-object vm,name,description | out-gridview -mode multiple
foreach ($snap in $snaps) {
get-vm $snap.vm | get-snapshot $snap.name -RunAsync -verbose -confirm:$false
}

You can change the svr-00* to be a subset of your VMs or remove it to get all of them.
You can modify "*201804*" to filter for a particular description.

Gives you a nice list, you can sort by column, pick the ones you want and clean it up.

If you want to get fancy, you can change the items to variable,s get some input from the user and plop it into the code. But I'll let you get fancy, here is the quick and dirty to get you started.

installing ESX 5.5 on HP Gen9 with internal SD Card

So for those of you still on 5.5 and not taking the leap to 6.5 (which is great since you can simply upgrade your whole Windows vCenter server to the vCenter appliance in one swift motion), we are going to look at the issues of Gen9 servers with ESX 5.5

First of all the SD Card, the smallest you can get from HP right now is 8GB, that I'm sure will increase again in a week or two. But it's more than enough for ESX.

So when the installed finds your storage, you'll see HP ILO SD Card, that is it. It bothered me because it said ILO and the ILO itself has an embedded installer folder and a user data folder that can be enabled, but that is the one to pick.

UPDATE: for the Gen10 servers it is USB 3.0 CDW weird names it finds, but knowing is half the battle.

Saturday, July 25, 2015

HP BL460 Blade Servers G7 vs G8 vs G9 Evaluation

HP has a solid chassis lineup for their blade servers, but if you don't purchase 100 blades all at once, you may be stuck with various Generations "G"s of their blades.

G7 - the LOM was fixed based on the base part number you started with. Then you add mezzanine cards of various models. The SD Chip to boot, is right on the side of the blade.

G8 - So, now you can CHOOSe the LOM module you want and swap it out if you want. You can add mezzanine cards, but WOW, the G7s don't fit in the G8s. A big disappointment to me when I had 8 extra 10GbE FlexFabric adapters from the G7s at 3K each and couldn't put them in the new G8s.

More coming

Friday, July 24, 2015

NetApp E-Series

I'm going to get an E5660 to play with soon. I want to see what it will be like as a target for backup. Looks like a pretty good bulk storage unit, 10GbE interface with iSCSI, or if you want, you can do 16Gbit FC. I'm going to stick with the 10GbE, because I have a lot of ports on the Cisco Nexus 5596s and the HP Blade chassis is connected to that as well.

HP has their 3Par 4200 series, but it was a lot more expensive than the E-Series.

Waiting on the stuff to come in, then I'll post more.

Linux Virtualization

OK, so they tell me I need to make a bunch of Linux desktops availbel to some people that want to get access to some Linux desktops and then actually use them. SOOOoooo.

I venture into Linux VDI.

Spice-space.org is my final resting place for this. The add-on packages run on a RedHat Enterprise virtualization host, and it looks like Fedora or CentOS will work as well. So I'm going to try all of these and see what works the best.

First I'll get RHEV-M running on a machine and go from there. Spice looks like it needs it's own server, I'll make that a VM on this host.

Hardware. I've got an old HP DL380-G6 hanging around with 72GB RAM, should do nicely. Need to find some HDs. I'll start with just some 300GB SAS Drives, but we will eventually try swapping that out with a 3 drive array of SSD drives to see what that does for our performance.

More to come, stay tuned. Comment if you're watching, so I know to update more often.

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Out of Topic - Captain Ed Freeman

Hi all,
I had to post this. I found about it from my dad. Thanks Dad. Made me happy to be an American.

You're a 19 year old kid. You are critically wounded and dying in the jungle somewhere in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam. It's November 11, 1967. LZ (landing zone) X-ray. Your unit is outnumbered 8-1 and the enemy fire is so intense from 100 yards away, that your CO (commanding officer) has ordered the MedEvac helicopters to stop coming in. You're lying there, listening to the enemy machine guns and you know you're not getting out. Your family is half way around the world, 12,000 miles away, and you'll never see them again. As the world starts to fade in and out, you know this is the day. Then - over the machine gun noise - you faintly hear that sound of a helicopter. You look up to see a Huey coming in. But.. It doesn't seem real because no MedEvac markings are on it. Captain Ed Freeman is coming in for you. He's not MedEvac so it's not his job, but he heard the radio call and decided he's flying his Huey down into the machine gun fire anyway. Even after the MedEvacs were ordered not to come. He's coming anyway. And he drops it in and sits there in the machine gun fire, as they load 3 of you at a time on board. Then he flies you up and out through the gunfire to the doctors & nurses & safety. And, he kept coming back!! 13 more times!! Until all the wounded were out. No one knew until the mission was over that the Captain had been hit 4 times in the legs and left arm. He took 29 of you and your buddies out that day. Some would not have made it without the Captain and his Huey.

Medal of Honor Recipient, Captain Ed Freeman, United States Air Force, died last Wednesday at the age of 70, in Boise, Idaho

May God Bless and Rest His Soul.

I bet you didn't hear about this hero's passing, but we've sure seen a whole bunch about the thugs Michael Brown & Trayvon Martin.

Read about him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Freeman
And here: http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/freeman.asp
And here: http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/e/ed-freeman.htm#.VQHvsfzF8wo

Shame on you American Media!!!