I finally took the plunge today and upgraded my first ESX 3.5 cluster node to vSphere 4.1. Installation went pretty much without a hitch as is my usual experience with VMware products, however once I got the new 4.1 node up and back into my cluster I noticed a warning telling me that “Host X currently has no management network redundancy”. I thought that was odd, since I have three physical NICs assigned to the vSwitch connected to my service console. Turns out the solution is quite simple.

When you first install ESX 4.1 you are asked which NIC you want to use for your management from the ones available in your server. This is the initial NIC that will be connected to your network to allow you initial access the server from vCenter and continue configuring, adding to the cluster, configuring networking etc.

When I added the new host to the cluster in vCenter it automatically sets it up for HA if your cluster has that enabled, and it does this will the current networking configuration, ie, one pNIC. If you then add the other pNICs in your server to the vSwitch containing the service console, the HA configuration doesn’t initially take this into account.

All you have to do at this point, is right-click your host node in the cluster and select the “Reconfigure for VMware HA” menu option. This will initiate a reconfiguration of the current HA settings taking into account the new networking configuration you just added. Once this step completes the warning about HA redundancy will disappear.

If you are like me, you almost never delete anything. And, it doesn’t matter how big a hard disk I install into my army of computers (my current main PC has almost 2TB of space although only around 500GB is actually free right now) I still manage to more or less fill it up entirely.

Well I got an email from a tech colleague today who was raving about a tool he had found on one of my work server hard drives while planning the migration of some mailboxes from one Exchange Server to another. I always leave a copy of this program lying around because it is very useful in trying to work out where all the really big stuff is hogging the disk space that you have long forgotten about and probably don’t even need anymore. I was quite surprised he didn’t already know about it as it’s been around for donkey’s years but since he didn’t it got me thinking; I wonder how many other people may have missed it.

So, without further ado, meet “TreeSize Free”, little sibling of the larger (not free) Tree Size Pro from JAM Software. JAM have been writing useful tools since about 1997, but this is probably my favourite. Basically it lets you scan a Windows folder structure in it’s entirity to show you which folders are taking up all the space. Once it finishes you have a complete listing of your whole disk, which you can drill down into to find the culprit files. You can display this space usage in a number of ways, and the program makes it really easy to find then delete stuff you don’t need.

The free version is perfectly suited for these needs and is a self-contained EXE, so no installation required to run it, perfect for keeping on your USB flash stick.

If you’ve not used it before then get over to JAM Software and check it out.

http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

Anyone who has forgotten the admin password for a Windows system will tell you that its a pain to get back into. Unless you have a bit of know-how, some might say impossible.

One way of doing it for example would be to use the free program NTFS4DOS, which allows you to access the files and folders of NTFS partitions from a DOS boot disk (without loading up Windows itself). This means you can access the SAM file without logging in, copy it to another working system and use a brute-force attempt to crack the local admin password. This can take a long time however, typically at least an hour or two, and depending on the strength of the password may take considerably longer.

Perhaps a much better way to do this would be to edit to the password directly in the SAM file and change it to one you know. That way you avoid the brute-force attack. Let me share with you a very clever program that somebody has written called the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor which can do just that.

Simply go to the website below, download the CD ISO image and burn to a blank CD. Boot up your Windows PC with this CD in the drive and you’ll get into a Linux OS with the required bits and pieces included to read in the SAM from your Windows partition, and through a number of questions that you’ll be hand-held through, you can reset the local admin password in a matter of a couple of minutes (less once you are familiar with the procedure).

This has saved me a lot of work plenty of times, and in fact I now carry the ISO around with me on the USB flash stick on my key ring.

One thing to note is that you must shut down the PC cleanly before you use this utility, otherwise it can’t write back to the SAM file succefully. If you get an error saying it failed to do this, simply reboot into windows and then click the shutdown option on the login screen before trying again.

Here’s the link… enjoy.

http://home.eunet.no/%7Epnordahl/ntpasswd/