Hi, I’m Steve

Last month we began the process of upgrading all our UCS domains to the newer 4.1 code release trains to enable new functionality/hardware and resolve some minor bugs. After we completed our first domain we were treated to a new fault code on each Fabric Interconnect, approximately 45 minutes after it’s individual upgrade completed. The fault code thrown was “Partition bootflash on fabric interconnect X is clean but with errors.” As this domain happened to be the very first UCS domain we ever had we assumed it may be an issue with the actual NVRAM in the FI. We triaged the case with TAC and determined that this was just enhanced file system checking in the 4.1 code train and that the fix is to run a e2fsck against the bootflash. In previous versions of UCS this would require the debug utility and manually running some commands. However, in 4.1(2a) and 4.0(4k) Cisco added the ability to run a e2fsck from the UCS CLI on the Fabric Interconnect. We figured this would be a one-off case, isolated to this domain, and didn’t think much of this. ...

Anyone that has spent any time with Cisco equipment should just come to expect that there’s a number of VLANs that Cisco reserves for internal use. Cisco UCS is no exception. However, in UCS land, there’s a few curve balls you need to be aware of from version numbers and hardware types. As I just completed an internal documentation of these VLAN IDs for our department, and since there’s a few places these are documented on Cisco’s web site, I felt it may make sense to just put them here for easy consumption later. In addition to the Cisco official documentation I’ve included my recommendations for reserving additional VLANs to make your life easier. ...

When Pure Storage released Purity 5.1 for the FlashArray they introduced a new host feature called Host Personality. Host Personalities offer a way to customize how the FlashArray presents storage to the physical host. Today Pure offers 5 types of Host Personalities: ESXi Hitachi VSP HP-UX Oracle VM Server VMS This post specifically focuses on what’s provided with the ESXi host personality and how to set this using PowerShell, VMware PowerCLI and the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK. ...

Update 12/5/2018: Pure Storage has modified the returned JSON file. The AccessKey is no longer stored as Id, rather it is stored as Name. I’ve updated the code below to reflect that. Part of my job involves managing our storage fleet, both block storage and some file level services. I recently had a conversation with some developers about methods in which we were storing files. The current process involved multiple layers consisting of applications, servers, virtualization and storage systems. Not that great for a rapidly growing file system. ...

Note: This process should work for Windows and Linux as well. Verify the EFI boot path for the OS. Through ESXi 6.0 I have run my hosts in Legacy BIOS mode on UCS. There just was nothing significant enough worth the hassle of switching to UEFI on UCS (rather: I had more important fires to put out…). The one feature I did want, Secure Boot, wasn’t supported by ESXi 6.0 and earlier. ...

We built our house a few years ago. Before all the drywall went up I wired tons of networking into each room, including for for the Legrand Home Automation system and whole house audio. The core home automation module, the HA7000, is the integration work engine of the system. It connects to Legrand’s cloud servers for remote alerting, updating, etc. On February 20th, 2018 they had a significant service outage and their restoration procedure is not so seamless. Rather than following their instructions of changing my home router’s DNS forwarder I broke out tcpdump and did some digging. So if you have a Legrand system, need to do this update, and don’t want to pass your DNS traffic to them, read on. The instructions Legrand provided lead the home owner/installer to change the DNS forwarder setting on the router to 35.171.238.72. Clearly what they had done was change the DNS records on this server. This meant no changes were made by the end user to the panel directly. The panel would simply get the new IP addresses and start communicating with the new server. Therefore all I needed were the DNS records the panel was doing a lookup on. On the router I ran tcpdump to watch for the queries from the panel: ...

It’s almost VMworld time! Have you checked out the VMworld site yet and registered? VMworld 2018 is being held in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay from August 26 - August 30. VMworld is by far the conference I look forward to the most each and every year, and I can hardly believe it’s almost VMworld time again! Each year VMworld gets bigger and better, and I am sure 2018 will be no exception. This will be my 6th time heading to the event and I still find something new each trip. If you’re looking to register for your first VMworld trip here’s some pointers I have learned from my trips so far. ...

The Information Technology field is quite a unique space to plant roots for a career. Very few fields have such open sharing of ideas, projects and aspirations as this field. I have been quite fortunate to have entered into the IT space just as the Internet and online services were really becoming A Thing™. I have always been amazed by just how eager fellow colleagues and peers are to share their ideas, scripts, projects, goals and accomplishments through both in person (conferences, work, over dinner) and through electronic mediums (blogs, forum posts, Slack channels). Up until the beginning of this year I have been an in-office employee, which has afforded me the opportunity to share my knowledge and help empower others, just like those that helped me when I started out in this industry (thank you Russ). I have always felt a great sense of satisfaction and pride when I can convey a topic to a colleague and recognize the light bulb go off. However at the beginning of this year I embarked on a new opportunity, affording me the ability to work from my home office almost 100% of the time. While this has granted me great changes in my work/life balance, it has to some degree removed my ability to share knowledge and exchange thoughts and ideas with others in my field. Enter this sumistev.com. For years I have talked about starting a blog to share PowerShell snippets, design ideas, issues and resolutions to technical things I administer, personal interests and hobbies. Perhaps others have experienced this, but the hardest part of beginning to document and blog has not been the content creation; rather it has been the tasks of picking and setting up a CMS and picking a domain name. Being a very much backoffice IT person typically lends to a lack of creativity, and it is this very thing that has kept me from creating a true online presence where I can share my thoughts and ideas. I have finally come to terms with this fact: I do not have a creative bone in my body. But letting this character flaw stop me from sharing knowledge, which has brought so much satisfaction personally and professionally, was unacceptable – and so, here we are! I have all sorts of ideas on topics I want to contribute here. First and foremost, my background in IT is virtualization, compute and storage – and I expect a significant quantity of my posts will be on these topics. I also find enjoyment with online multiplayer games, various scripting languages (primarily PowerShell) and home automation – so I suspect I will have times where these areas of interest will also come to the foreground. In 1998, while entering the 7th grade, a planetarium director for our school corporation’s planetarium accepted me into the planetarium club (past the acceptance date, which he has only done a handful of times ever). That decision charted the course for my life into Information Technology. I will be forever grateful to him for this decision, and I easily attribute my success, professionally and personally, to his mentoring. One of the greatest things he ever impressed on us was not letting perfection become the enemy of the good. It is with this thought in mind that I decided to stop letting my inability to come up with some creative and catchy blog name (such as William Lam’s virtuallyGhetto blog) get in my way of mentoring, sharing and helping our industry become a better place. I am excited to have finally established some place to start sharing things I have created and learned, and I hope others will find it to be valuable as well. Thanks for stopping by – and I look forward to future interactions!