When installing vCenter update manager in a lab, I got this :
“Error 25005.Setup failed to generate the SSL keys”
It appears that since I have installed vCenter Server, vSphere client, and tried to install the update manager all in one sitting without rebooting, there has been some path confusion and it could not find openssl.exe (or the right version of it). Allowing it to roll back, rebooting, and trying again fixed the issue for me.
Here is a list of what I used last week, right after taking the ICM course for vSphere, in order to pass my VCP exam.
This little document packs a lot of punch, read it a few times !
This document is longer, and includes a lot of interesting info about vSphere. Could be just what you need if upgrading from an older certification !
And finally, I used a few test exams:
VCP vSphere 4 Practice Exam – The SLOG – SimonLong/Blog.
All exams from Simon Long were useful, the ones concentrating on the maximums will help you know if you know that stuff by heart as you should. Be aware that I felt that the actual exam was a good 20-25% harder than the test questions of the main test exam.
I then used the mock exam from VMware (you can find it after login into myLearn).
Be sure not to attempt the test exams before you are relatively sure you’re ready, as they don’t have many questions and doing them too fast will then make them useless as you will already know most questions and answers. VMware’s mock exam felt a bit easier than the real one too, by about 10-15%.
Good luck to everyone!
A lot of people running ESX 3.5 Update 2 have been experiencing a slight bug where you can’t start or restart VMs starting August 12th 2008. Well, that could be a problem.
Here’s a thread about the issue with some workarounds which involve messing with the host’s time. (Watch out not to sync your Domain controllers with the wrong time, or bye bye Kerberos!).
Also, today is patch Tuesday by Microsoft and I’m sure a lot of people will be installing critical security patches and rebooting Virtual Machines. That should be interesting…but hey, people will learn not to patch stuff too fast.
The real issue with this is that VMware, an enterprise solution, has built-in license management. How can companies not realize that schemes such as this always hurt the honest customer? The dishonest ones are probably running cracked versions that weren’t affected by this.
Vmware
When I use Windows virtual machines, sometimes the system beep gets annoying to my neighbors.
When I use Linux virtual machines, it goes through my laptop’s PC Speaker, which makes me have a heart attack, and annoys my neighbor.
Find your Vmware preferences file
Windows: Application Data\VMware\preferences.ini
Linux: ~/vmware/preferences (you could possibly do it in the system wide config as well)
Add this line:
mks.noBeep = TRUE
All beeps should be gone.
Windows itself
If for some reason you use some other Virtualization product that does not allow you to disable beeps, just create a Group Policy on your test domain (you could do it local as well). Configure any non critical service in the GPO to be DISABLED. (I use the print spooler).
Once that is done, browse to the sysvol, find the GPO’s folder, and edit the security policy text file. Replace the name of the service you disabled with “beep”.
The reason we have to do that is because you don’t see the beep service in the list of the GPO editor. But this effectively disables the beep service that Windows uses, well, to beep ! I deploy this on test domains where I “beep” often.
