WhiteHatTechs

If you're like me and planning on using multiple physical hosts for your VMware home lab and yet want to conserve power and are lucky enough to have enterprise level hardware, VMware Dynamic Power Management (DPM) is probably your answer. You will need a bit of prep work to get this going, but once done, your lab will dynamically spin up and power down your physical nodes as needed. Assumptions: 1) You are using some form of server that has a baseboard management controller, also known as a BMC (such as Dell DRAC or HP iLO - DRAC in this example) 2) You are using vCenter to manage your lab Setup: 1) First you will have to ensure that your DRAC is configured to have IPMI enabled over the LAN ( Intelligent Platform Management Interface - see wiki if interested). You can do this by logging into your DRAC, selecting "Remote Access" then the "Configuration" tab, and towards the bottom you will find "Enable IPMI Over LAN". Ensure that is c

OK, so short story: If you have a PowerEdge 1950, and buy a 64GB RAM kit and shortly after upgrading you get either E1420 CPU Bus Perr errors (especially when loading ESXi), go into the Memory section of the BIOS and turn on Mirroring. Now, the long story: Alright, so this made me a bit irritated. Dell has 3 Generations of PowerEdge 1950, the Gen 1 Supports up to 32GB RAM, Gen 2.... eh, no real good documentation on that, and the Glorious Gen 3 which will allow this old server to go up to 64GB of DDR2 RAM. Beautiful for a home lab right? Well, be careful about which version you have. If you're lucky and have a Dell branded one, you can look at the rack ear on the left hand side and it'll either be blank, or have a circle with an II (Gen 2) or III (Gen 3 obviously). Unfortunately, I don't. I have a pair of salvaged EMC RecoveryPoint servers which were 1950's rebranded. Yes I have service tags, no I don't have the markings. I check the website with the service