HP Agentless Management Service (AMS) causes "Can't Fork" and MKS errors

If you find that you can't suddenly remote ANY VM's on a host and are given a "Cannot connect to MKS" error and trying to do anything on an ESXi console generate a "Cant Fork" error, then you need to upgrade your HP management Agents on your HP ESXi servers.  This error impacts version 5.0 and upwards and is outlined in KB2085618

I can confirm that upgrading to version 10.0.1 as per the article does remove the error.  Please note this only impacts servers that run the HP customised ISO / HP installed management agents with the impacted versions as listed in the KB.

Add ZFS storage space usage to SSH MOTD in Ubuntu 14.04

If you want to change the SSH Message of the Day so that it doesn't show the default / drive space AND have it show the size of your zfs pool then you have to do the following to allow it to display.  Please note that this is done on Ubuntu 14.04

First edit the disk.py file under /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/landscape/lib with your favourite text editor and at the end of the STABLE_FILESYSTEMS entry add ', "zfs"' as shown in the screenshot below, then save and quit the editor

Next, edit the disk.py file under /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/landscape/sysinfo with your favourite text editor and find the line main_info = get_filesystem_for_path("/", self._mounts_file, and edit the "/" path to the zfs file system you want, in my case its "/zfs/storage".  Also edit root_main_info = get_filesystem_for_path("/"..... and replace the "/" with the same entry as above.  These changes can be seen in the screenshot below.  Save and then quit the editor.  *Note a recent update removes the root_main_info line and is no longer required*

Done, the next time you ssh in to your server, you'll see your ZFS file system space!!!

HP NMI Error with ESXi - Gen8

In the environment many of our ESXi hosts (HP DL380 Gen8's) have generated PSOD's with NMI generated events.  If you are experiencing this issue please UPGRADE your ilo4 firmware to version 1.51.  The issue described is under HP article c04332584.  You can download the latest firmware from HP.



Deploying OVA fails with "Failed to Deploy OVF/OVA package: The operation is not supported on the object"

We recently had an issue deploying either an OVA/OVF file that was created from one of the virtual machines in our environment.  Deploying this OVA failed instantly (after entering cluster locations / datastore) with the following error: "The Operation is not supported on the object".  After much investigation and examining the /var/log/hostd.log file on the ESXi host we were trying to deploy too, we found the line:  "Video Ram size edit is not supported when auto-detect is True."  Editing the Virtual Machine hardware settings and editing the Video Card and changing the setting from Auto-detect to Specify custom settings (This can be anything) and then exporting the virtual machine as an OVA allowed the deployment to work! Very interesting that this setting caused a problem!  Previously we have also encountered this when the Virtual Machine has an ISO mounted when to converting to OVA.