Aaron Delp’s BladeVault

I have seen this many times and it has been a source of frustration for many IBM Blade customers.  A while back IBM introduced the ability to change the focus of the KVM and media tray from one blade to another from the local keyboard.  Previous to this, you were required to push the button on the front or remotely change the focus from the Management Module Interface.  If you don’t know about this feature, it can be confusing because the keyboard will be unresponsive and seem to lock up.  You can tell when the KVM is in this mode because the num-lock, caps-lock, and scroll lock LEDS will flash in sequence over and over.

In order to return KVM focus back to the blade you are using you are required to press NumLk-NumLk-(blade slot number)-Enter

In order to return media tray focus back to the blade you are using you are required to press NumLk-NumLk-m-(blade slot number)-Enter

Link to IBM BladeCenter KVM Tip

Judging by the number of posts recently, it is no surprise that I haven’t seen a lot of good documentation surrounding VMWare Update Manager.  One thing I haven’t seen is a best practices on how to configure Update Manager.  Here is a list of the options and some thoughts on setting for each one.

1. To access the configuration settings, Click the Update Manager Button
2. Click the Configuration Tab in Update Manager
3. Guest Settings -> By default this will take a snapshot of guests but not delete them.  This can degrade performance.  Consider not taking snapshots or have them autodelete after a certain number of hours (Max appears to be 100 hours)
4. ESX Host Settings -> By default the response of ESX hosts that can not enter maintenance mode is to retry every 30 minutes but the number of times is set for zero.  That doesn’t make sense to me.  Consider setting the value to 1 or 2 and setting the time as appropriate for your environment.  In addition to retry as an action, you can also Fail Task, Power Off and Retry, or Suspend and Retry
5. Update Downloads -> Click Update Downloads in the upper right corner

• • Under Select Update Types, check the boxes for the OS’s you will update.  By default, Windows, Linux and ESX are all checked.  If you are only going to update ESX servers, uncheck Windows and Linux.  Click Next.
  • Under Schedule Task, enter the parameters for the scheduled download task and click Next
  • Under E-mail Notification, optionally enter the e-mail addresses to be notified when new updates are downloaded and click Next
  • Click Finish

You can also modify the Internet Settings if you have a proxy server and/or modify the ports Update Manager uses.  I will assume this is self explanatory.

Hey all - It appears my Hyper-V and XenServer write-ups caused a bit of traffic and comments.  First off, it is awesome!!!  Thank you!!!  I want to make sure everything that is presented here is accurate and I am coming up to speed on those two products.

But, I just flew back from the IBM Technical Conference in San Deigo on the red eye last night.  I just woke up and it’s now family time for a bit.  I will respond to all comments and e-mails shortly and I will make any corrections and clarifications this weekend.  Again, thank you for your time and attention!!  Now, off to play with my little girls who haven’t seen me since Sunday!