MS SQL key is lost?

Just a quick post for my own convenience. Probably, experienced MS SQL administrators already know, but for the rest of us, this can be useful.

Last week one of my colleagues had to upgrade an evaluation version of MS SQL 2008 R2 to a fully licensed version. After downloading and mounting the .ISO file, the setup was started. At some point you are asked to enter the product key. However the product key was not available at the MS download site. The good news is that the key is part of the .ISO file.

Go to the x64 and open the file DefaultSetup.ini. The line that starts with “PID=”, contains the product key.

Source for this post.

See also my post on upgrading MS SQL 2008 R2 Express edition to a Standard Edition.

Thanks for reading.

VMware Iaas exam Study Notes

While preparing for my VMware Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Exam (exam code: VCPVCD510), I have compiled some Study Notes.

During my preparations, I have followed the official Exam Blue print, the notes are based on this document. The information comes from the official VMware documentation, references to blog posts and lots of screen shots from my Home lab.

The notes do not cover each objective in every aspect (that’s why I named it Study Notes instead of a Study Guide). However, I am sure it provides a lot of useful information.

Without a doubt, the best way to prepare for this exam is to download and install the bytes. Then build and break vCloud Director, vCenter Chargeback Manager and the other stuff.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Link: VCP Cloud Study Notes 20130406

Cannot Re-Deploy Edge gateway

Last week, my home lab experienced some storage problems. The result was losing at least one LUN, formatted as a VMFS file system. The file system was part of a vCloud Director (vCD) setup and home to some test VMs, and also a few edge gateways, one of them belonging to an Org VDC network.

So, it was time to see how to restore the missing Edge gateway.

The first idea was to see if the Re-deply option could solve the issue.

Figure 1 – vCloud Director Edge gateway

So, login to vCloud Director, select the Edge gateway and select Re-deploy from the available actions. Unfortunately, the result was negative. The task detail explains why, re-deploy is meant to publish the configuration to an Edge gateway, but communication with the Edge gateway is essential.

Figure 2

First part of the solution is, to login to the “VMware vShield Manager”.

• Under “View”, select Edges;
• In the left pane, select “Edge Gateways” and in the right pane, select the faulty edge gateway.
• Under “Actions”, you will also find “Redeploy Edge”, but that won’t help you.
• Instead, select “Manage”.

Figure 3 – Edges, Edge gateways

• The detail window opens, select Settings. At the bottom, under “Edge Appliances”, select the only available Edge Appliance and choose the “Delete” option (red cross).

Figure 4

• Now, choose “Add”, to recreate the Edge gateway
• Fill in the required information, and choose “Add”.
  The “Cluster/Resource Pool” is usually a System vDC resource pool. Select a Datastore, Host and Folder for placement.

Figure 5

• If everything goes well, you can follow the progress in the vCenter server, the Edge gateway will be deployed.
• Switch back to vCloud Director, select the Edge gateway and choose Re-Deploy. This time the Edge gateway will be configured and report Status OK.

That is all. I thank you for reading and as always, I welcome your comments.

Tiny Core Linux VM 32 bit!

Just a quick post. A lot has already been written about the Tiny Core Linux VM, so I won’t repeat that.

This VM is ideal for testing purposes. For instance you are building environments based on nested ESXi hosts and you want a small VM for testing HA, network connectivity and so on.

In my case, there was only one small problem. Since vSphere 5.1, my hardware does not support running 64 bit VMs on nested ESXi hosts.

The resolution is easy, in fact this version of Tiny Core Linux is 32-bit. So after importing the .OVA, just edit the configuration. On the Options tab, change the Guest OS from “Other Linux (64-bit)” to “Other Linux (32-bit)”. That’s all.

Figure 1

Credits for the people at the Tiny Core Linux project and Iwan Rahabok for creating the .OVA. You can find it here.

vCenter Chargeback Manager – Part 3

This is the third part in a series of posts on the vCenter Chargeback Manager (vCCM, from now on). Part 1 was all about the installation of vCCM. In Part 2, the basic configuration was discussed. In this part, I will explain some of the philosophy behind the product, and start creating reports.

I suppose you have installed and configured vCCM without any problems? Did you add a vCenter server and the vCenter Chargeback Manager Data Collector is running? Fine.

By the way, these posts come from my study notes while preparing for my VCP5-IaaS certification and cover at least parts of Objective 1.1 – Install vCloud Components and Section 3 – Configure and Administer vCenter Chargeback.

A word about vCenter Chargeback Manager Users, roles and permissions.
After the installation of vCCM has finished, there is only one user, in my case I named the account “admin”. This first user has the role of Super User.  This role has all the privileges. vCCM provides a mechanism called resource-based authorization. As such vCCM works with; Resource types, Users and Groups, Roles and Permissions.
For the sake of simplicity, I will continue to work with my “admin” account.

Figure 1 – Users

vCenter Chargeback Manager – Part 2

In the previous post, I have discussed the basic installation of vCenter Chargeback Manager (vCCM, from now on). In this post we will continue and show the basic configuration of the product.

I suppose you have installed vCCM without any problems and all services are running. vCCM has quite a number of services, which should  start automatically.

To log in to vCCM, you will need a supported browser, in my case IE 9 and Firefox worked well.

On the vCCM server, you launch the application from the Windows menu. From a remote workstation, provide the application URL, which was displayed after installing vCCM.

When you log in to vCCM for the first time, you will be prompted to enter a license key.

Figure 1 – License

Provide the License key and the credentials, created during the installation. When the license key has been accepted, you can log in to the application.

vCenter Chargeback Manager – Part 1

The exam blueprint for the VMware Certified Professional Cloud (VCP-Cloud) certification includes several products. Of course, vSphere ESXi and vCenter Server are the basic building blocks and vCloud Director is the most discussed product. But there is another product you need to understand; vCenter Chargeback Manager (vCCM, from now on). You need to know how to install the product; also a full section of the blueprint is dedicated to configuration and administration. You need to know how to generate Reports. But before you can generate your first report, you have been through a lot of stages.

So, I expected to find a lot of posts on this subject, but I did not. For that reason, in a series of posts, I will share my experience with the vCCM. In the first part, let’s start with the installation of vCCM.

Note: In my case, I installed vCCM for training purposes. For that reason, I did not completely follow all steps and recommendations in the official documentation. So, in case, you need to install vCCM in a real-life production environment, I recommended having a look at the vCenter Chargeback Manager Installation and Upgrade Guide.

You can find the official resources here and start a free trial for 60 days. Some useful official documents are:

• vCenter Chargeback Manager Installation and Upgrade Guide
• vCenter Chargeback Manager User’s Guide
• Best Practices and Troubleshooting Guide