Assiging an alternate port to VMware Licesing

Edit the VMware License file

Open the .lic file in your editor of choice and locate

SERVER this_host ANY 27000
ENDOR VMWARELM port=27010

SERVER this_host ANY 27005
ENDOR VMWARELM port=27015

create the following XML file

<!-- Firewall configuration for License Server on Alt port  -->
<ConfigRoot>
  <service id='0000'>
    <id>LicenseClientAltPort</id>
    <rule id='0000'>
      <direction>outbound</direction>
      <protocol>tcp</protocol>
      <port type='dst'>27005</port>
      <flags>-m state --state NEW</flags>
    </rule>
    <rule id='0001'>
      <direction>outbound</direction>
      <protocol>tcp</protocol>
      <port type='dst'>27015</port>
      <flags>-m state --state NEW</flags>
    </rule>
  </service>
</ConfigRoot>

Copy the file to /etc/vmware/firewall on all of your servers

important: you may want to disable High Avalability for the next step as we’re breaking management network connectivity temporarily, it may trigger a host failure and start powering up your VMs.

ssh in as root and issue

service mgmt-vmware restart

Log into each ESX host using VMware Infrastructure Client, open security profile and enable your new port definition

Open Licensed Features and prepend 27005@ to your license server name

Your hosts should now be licensed!

In PerfDataSource, could not find counter Process, Working Set, IEXPLORE* in Snapshot. Unable to submit Performance value. Module will not be unloaded..........

It appears it’s a well known fault with an equally well known workaround, a few clicks of the mouse and it’s all quiet on the SCE front!

With a bit of hunting I found the following symptoms and related hotfix 958387.

Scenario 1

A memory leak occurs in the Virtual Disk Service when an application uses the Virtual Disk Service to enumerate disk resources. In this scenario, you notice that the memory consumption of the Virtual Disk Service (Vds.exe) increases continually.

So far so good… here’s hoping the issue is long gone

The workaround is remarkably simple.

1. Disable the firewall on target server

2. Deploy the agent and reboot

3. On the target server in an administrator’s command prompt run C:\Program Files\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\bin\SetDpmServer.exe -dpmServerName <servername>

4. Re-enable the firewall on the target server

Rather than poking in the dark trying to work out the delays you can turn on verbose logging for the userenv process.

1. Open the registry of the computer/server you are troubleshooting
2. Browse to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
3. Right click Winlogon, select New, and then chosse DWORD
4. Enter the following name for the DWORD Value: UserEnvDebugLevel
5. Enter 30002 as a hex value

Userenv will now log to %systemRoot%\Debug\UserMode

Grab a copy of Policy Reporter from SysPro Soft, this will help you in parsing the log files, alternativley you can open the files in notepad/wordpad and run through them manually

net stop beep

will do the trick for a temporary fix, to stop it permanently just disable the service

sc config beep start= disabled

Creating the Certificate

Open IIS Manager and select the instance.
Select Server Certificates

Select Create Domain Certificate

Populate the form, remember Common Name is the FQDN for the certificate.

Select your Certification Authority (CA) and fill in Friendly Name (display name)

Assigning the certificate

Open IIS Manager and select the Virtual Site you wish to apply the new certificate to

Click on Bindings

Select the HTTPS binding and click on EDIT

From the dropdown menu SSL Certificate select your new domain certificate and ok it.

All of my managed servers/computers were coming up with the following status
MODEL: unkown
Last Contacted: not contacted 
Deployments and Inventory: error

After a bit of poking around I worked out it’s related to the windows update service.

 One one of the workstations I inspected the WindowsUpdate.log file and came across this entry

Server URL = https://systemcentre.foo.local:8531/SimpleAuthWebService/SimpleAuth.asmx

WARNING: GetAuthorizationCookie failure, error = 0×80244021, soap client error = 10, soap error code = 0, HTTP status code = 502

Browsing from the workstation to https://systemcentre.foo.local:8531/SimpleAuthWebService/SimpleAuth.asmx gave me the error

Error Code: 502 Proxy Error. The specified Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) port is not allowed. ISA Server is not configured to allow SSL requests from this port. Most Web browsers use port 443 for SSL requests. (12204)

To get around this, I installed ISA Tunnel Port Editor and added port 8531 to the SSL tunnel range.

1.       Boot the windows server 2008 cd

2.       Select your language

3.       Select repair your computer

4.       c:\
cd \windows\system32
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} osdevice boot

5.       Restart

 
I have since learned that you can just use shrink volume from within the storage manager. 

Set server name

In a command prompt type:
netdom renamecomputer %computername% /NewName:dc-dev-2

Set IP

Determine the name of the interface to change, more often than not it will be Local Area Connection

netsh interface ipv4 show interfaces

Idx  Met   MTU   State        Name
—  —  —–  ———–  ——————-
  2   10   1500  connected    Local Area Connection
  1   50 4294967295  connected    Loopback Pseudo-Interface 1

Time to change the IP

netsh interface ipv4 set address name=”Local Area Connection” source=static address=192.168.10.11 mask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.10.254

And set the DNS

netsh interface ipv4 add dnsserver name=”Local Area Connection” address=192.168.10.18 index=1

Repeat as needed for secondary, tertiary etc, just be sure to increase the index value 

Join domain

We return to the netdom command, the trailing asterix will prompt you to type in the password (safer) but you can just hard code it in

netdom join %computername% /domain:blerg.local /userd:Administrator /passwordd:*

 Install DHCP and DNS services (optional)

the following lines install DNS and DHCP, handy to have but not essential, really depends on your existing network topology

start /w ocsetup dns-server-core-role

start /w ocsetup dhcpservercore

DCPROMO

To run dcpromo in a GUIless environment you need to create an unattend file

edit unattend.txt

paste in the following