Dell EMC VxRail 4.7 Default Password List

May 4, 2021March 10, 2022 Scott Forehand

Recently, I’ve had to factory reset a few VxRail nodes for some testing I’ve been doing and I thought it might be a good idea to publish the defaults that Dell EMC uses for VxRail running 4.7 code.

Component	Networking Configuration	Username	Default Password
BIOS	N/A	N/A	emcbios
iDRAC	DHCP	root	calvin
ESXi root	DHCP	root	Passw0rd!
vCenter Server Appliance	Defined at deployment	root	vmware
Platform Services Controller	Defined at deployment	root	vmware
vRealize Log Insight	DHCP	root	Passw0rd!
VxRail Manager	192.168.10.200	root	Passw0rd!
VxRail Manager Plugin	Defined at deployment	root	Passw0rd!
VxRail Manager		mystic	VxRailManager@201602!
VxRail Manager Plugin		mystic	VBManager201415!

Hopefully this helps someone out there!…

Dell EMC VxRail 4.5 Upgrade Process: The Aftermath

September 12, 2020November 2, 2020 Scott Forehand

Part 1: Dell EMC VxRail 4.5 Upgrade Process: Before We Begin
Part 2: Dell EMC VxRail 4.5 Upgrade Process: Upgrading the Cluster
Part 3: Dell EMC VxRail 4.5 Upgrade Process: The Aftermath

In the final post in this 3-part series, we cover some of the things that need to be done post upgrade for a VxRail 4.5 cluster.

Cleanup Process After a Successful Upgrade

Log into the vSphere Web Client.
Navigate to Hosts and Clusters.
Delete all snapshots from the VxRail Manager service VM.
1. Right-click the VxRail Manager VM, select Snapshots > Delete All Snapshots.
Delete all snapshots from the vCenter Server Appliance service VM.
1. Right-click the vCenter Server Appliance VM, select Snapshots > Delete All Snapshots.
Delete all snapshots from the Platform Services Controller service VM.
1. Right-click the Platform Services Controller VM, select Snapshots > Delete All Snapshots.
If changes were made to avoid vSAN timeout issues during the upgrade process, change the following Advanced System Setting when the upgrade is complete.
1. Navigate to Hosts and Clusters.
2. Select the first node in the cluster.
3. Select Configure > System > Advanced System Settings.
4. Locate the VSAN.ClomRepairDelay setting.
5. Change the current value of

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Dell EMC VxRail 4.5 Upgrade Process: Before We Begin

July 18, 2020November 2, 2020 Scott Forehand

Part 1: Dell EMC VxRail 4.5 Upgrade Process: Before We Begin
Part 2: Dell EMC VxRail 4.5 Upgrade Process: Upgrading the Cluster
Part 3: Dell EMC VxRail 4.5 Upgrade Process: The Aftermath

In Part 1 of this 3-part series, we’ll address what to do prior to kicking off an upgrade of your 4.5 VxRail cluster. There are a few “gotchas” I’ve run into in the past that I address here. Hopefully it’s helpful.

Generating the SolVe Upgrade Procedure

Log into Dell EMC SolVe Online.
Select All Products from the menu.
Click the VxRail Appliance button.
Click the Software Upgrade Procedures link.
Select the model of the VxRail appliances being upgraded, and click the Next button.
Select the VxRail software version currently installed on the VxRail appliances being upgraded, and scroll down.
Select the VxRail software version targeted for installation on the VxRail appliances being upgraded, and click the Next button.
Click the Generate button to generate an upgrade procedure.
Save, open and read the procedure thoroughly once it has been generated.
Download the VxRail Composite Bundle for the version of software targeted in the upgrade.

Before Upgrading the VxRail Cluster

Log into the vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface using

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Add Download Sources to VMware Update Manager (VUM)

May 16, 2020November 2, 2020 Scott Forehand

An ESXi host can have custom vSphere Installation Bundles (VIBs) installed. Typically, this includes things like third-party drivers or management agents. In some cases, you may want to manage those installed drivers or agents with VMware Update Manager (VUM) to deploy a specific known-good configuration across a cluster with ease. Here’s how you add 3rd party download sources to VUM in vCenter:

vSphere Web Client (Flex)

On the vSphere client home screen, click the Update Manager icon.
On the Configuration tab, click Download Settings.
Click Add Download Source.
Enter the Source URL for the Download Source you want to add.
Click OK.
Click Download Now to upload the package, then click Apply.

vSphere Client

On the vSphere client home screen, click Menu, then Update Manager icon.
On the Settings tab, click Patch Setup.
Click New to create a new download source.
Enter the Source URL and Description for the Download Source you want to add.
Click OK.
On the Settings tab, click Patch Downloads.
Click Download Now to download new patch definitions.

Not every manufacturer supports integration with VMware Update Manager, but here’s what I could find.

3rd Party Download Sources for

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SQL Server on VMware vSphere Best Practices: Host, Disk, CPU and Memory Considerations

February 8, 2020November 2, 2020 Scott Forehand

Part 1: SQL Server on VMware vSphere Best Practices: Host, Disk, CPU and Memory Considerations
Part 2: SQL Server on VMware vSphere Best Practices: Availability Group, Licensing and Other Considerations

I realized recently that I never documented my process for designing high-performance Microsoft SQL environments on VMware vSphere. For the most part, what you’re about to read is a brain dump, and is intended to serve as an outline. Please make sure that you research all of the configurations for your specific deployment requirements, rather than take everything I say and dump it in to your shiny new Microsoft SQL environment. In Part 1, we’ll dive into some of the more common settings and configurations that are done in a virtualized SQL environment.

ESXi Host Considerations

Power Management

A good rule of thumb is to set Power Management to High Performance on the ESXi host. This needs to be done both in the BIOS and from within the vSphere Client to take effect.

Second Level Address Transaltion (SLAT)

It’s necessary that the host supports Second Level Address Transaltion. Most 64-bit processors support this technology. When referencing Intel processors, SLAT = Extended Page Tables. When referencing AMD processors, SLAT …

The Gamification of VMware Hands-on Labs – Meet Odyssey

November 23, 2019November 23, 2019 Scott Forehand

Sometimes digging in and learning about all the newest things in the VMware arsenal can feel tedious and daunting. VMware apparently heard our cries, and introduced VMware Odyssey at VMworld 2019. Odyssey aims to be a brand-new approach to evaluating and learning the VMware catalog.

How is it a brand-new approach, you ask? Simply, they’ve added gamification elements to the VMware Hands-on Labs that we know and love.

VMware Odyssey is a series of 15-minute tasks that challenge your knowledge and expertise across the entire VMware portfolio. VMware developed a game engine that will automatically check that a Hands-on Lab task was completed correctly, and it gives you instant feedback. There’s even a leaderboard to see how you stack up to others that have taken the Odyssey-enabled Hands-on Labs. Check out this video to learn more:

Not bad, eh? Expect to see more from the VMware Odyssey team in the future.…

VMware Ports and Protocols Tool

September 1, 2019November 23, 2019 Scott Forehand

If you’re tired of pouring through VMware documentation to find specific port requirements for their software like I am, this post is going to be a god-send for you. With VMware announcing new features, products and services regularly, it can be hard to keep up with what software and version have specific requirements that you need to deploy to make everything work well. VMware offers a little-advertised tool to help you discover, digest and retain all of the ports and protocol information. I don’t think it’s been around long, since I just discovered it this year. If you haven’t seen it…

Allow me to introduce the VMware Ports and Protocols website. The site is mobile friendly, and pretty intuitive.

This tool allows you to select specific software suites, and displays the required ports and protocols for you to make it easy for you to understand your networking requirements before you deploy anything at all. There are even export options. You can download Excel or CSV formatted files, and print the results. Here’s an example of the output:

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How to Change the IP Address of an ESXi Host via ESX CLI

August 14, 2019August 14, 2019 Scott Forehand

I recently had a colleague reach out with a need to change the IP address of an ESXi host without access to the GUI. I thought it might be useful to outline the steps here, in case it’s helpful for someone else.

Changing the IP address of a host is actually pretty straight forward with ESX CLI. Before you get started, list all of the VMkernel NICs using this command:

esxcli network ip interface ipv4 get

That will return a list of all of the VMkernel interfaces and their details. Now you can change the IP address of the VMKernel adapter:

esxcli network ip interface ipv4 set -i vmkX -I <IP_ADDRESS> -N <SUBNET_MASK> -t static

And that’s it, you’re all done. You’ll lose connection to the host and need to SSH back in, but the host will have the new IP address.…

VMware Mangle – Chaos Engineering Made Easy

May 26, 2019November 23, 2019 Scott Forehand

In any enterprise organization there’s an immediate need to test and validate fault-tolerance and recoverability. If you have a VMware virtual environment, testing just got a lot easier. Meet VMware Mangle.Mangle enables folks like us to run chaos engineering experiments against applications and infrastructure components, and allows us to quickly assess resiliency and fault tolerance. It was designed to introduce faults with minimal pre-configuration and can support any infrastructure that you might have including K8S, Docker, vCenter or any Remote Machine with SSH enabled. Included in Mangle is a pretty powerful plugin model that allows the engineer to define a custom fault of their choice based on a template and run it against the environment without building code from scratch.

For those of us that want a quick and easy way to install Mangle just about anywhere, grab the container images.

If you’re not that fancy yet, or prefer to deploy a virtual appliance on vSphere that is pre-packaged with Mangle, you can grab the .ova files.

In either case, refer to the VMware Mangle website for detailed instructions on deployment and configuration.…

How to Install, Update, and Remove the Nimble Connection Manager on ESXi

February 2, 2019February 2, 2019 Scott Forehand

There are a few ways to install Nimble Connection Manager (NCM) on your ESXi hosts. The easiest way is to add the appropriate download source to VMware Update Manager (VUM) in your vCenter, then create and attach a baseline for Nimble Connection Manager to each of your ESXi hosts attached to the HPE Nimble array. Doing so will ensure that Nimble Connection Manager is installed or updated during your normal VMware Update Manager update cycle which will keep Nimble Connection Manager updated across your infrastructure. For those that need them, here are the source URLs:

Nimble Connection Manager Download Sources for VMware Update Manager
ESX Version	Download Source
ESXi 5.x	https://update.nimblestorage.com/esx5/ncm/index.xml
ESXi 6.0	https://update.nimblestorage.com/esx6/ncm/index.xml
ESXi 6.5	https://update.nimblestorage.com/esx6.5/ncm/index.xml

Now that you have the download sources, what do you do with them? For starters, add them to VMware Update Manager (VUM). For detailed instructions on how to do that, check out my blog post on the subject, or VMware Docs.

Another option is to install Nimble Connection Manager directly to the host. There are a few prerequisites for this method:

Enable SSH on the host.
1. Select the host, click Manage, and keep Settings selected.
2. Click Security Profile.
3. In the

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How to Cleanly Uninstall the Nimble Connection Manager Before an ESXi Upgrade

November 11, 2018November 11, 2018 Scott Forehand

If you’re using HPE Nimble storage arrays to back your VMware environment, there’s something that you should know. Lets start from the top. As of this writing, the Nimble Connection Manager (NCM) for ESXi comes in three different flavors. There’s a version available for use with ESXi 5.X, one available for use with ESXi 6.0, and one available for use with ESXi 6.5. Add the appropriate download source to VMware Update Manager (VUM), then create and attach a baseline for Nimble Connection Manager to your hosts. Doing so will ensure that Nimble Connection Manager is installed or updated during your normal VMware Update Manager update cycle which will keep Nimble Connection Manager updated across your infrastructure. For those that need them, here are the source URLs:

Nimble Connection Manager Download Sources for VMware Update Manager
ESX Version	Download Source
ESXi 5.x	https://update.nimblestorage.com/esx5/ncm/index.xml
ESXi 6.0	https://update.nimblestorage.com/esx6/ncm/index.xml
ESXi 6.5	https://update.nimblestorage.com/esx6.5/ncm/index.xml

I recently upgraded my entire VMware environment from vSphere 5.5 to 6.5. Because I had Nimble Connection Manager installed on the hosts, and the version installed was compatible with ESXi 5.X, I had to do a few things before I could upgrade the hosts. If you leave the older version of Nimble

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How to Cleanly Uninstall Legacy NSX and Trend Micro from ESXi

November 8, 2018November 8, 2018 Scott Forehand

So I recently migrated from a vSphere 5.5 environment to 6.5 using the migration utility. Overall, I had a great experience with a few exceptions, both of which were my fault. We’ll cover one of them in this post.

We were running Trend Micro Deep Security, which means we had NSX deployed in support of that product throughout our environment. My thinking, incorrectly, was that after the vCenter upgrade, I could upgrade the existing NSX components of the environment and I would be off to the races!

That was a mistake, and I thought it might be worth it for me to share what I saw unfolding, and how I resolved the issues. So here goes…

After the vCenter upgrade was successful, I noticed that I no longer had an NSX manager registered, which was odd. I was seeing issues with DRS, and the only way to get around the virtual machines hanging and eventually erroring out during DRS triggered vMotions was to manually migrate the virtual machines to other hosts and place the affected host in Maintenance Mode while I took steps to remove all things NSX, Guest Introspection and Trend Micro.

Here’s a step-by-step walkthrough of how I …

Homelab Considerations: Storage Simulators for Your Homelab

October 23, 2018October 23, 2018 Scott Forehand

Part 1: Homelab Considerations: Software Licensing for Your Homelab
Part 2: Homelab Considerations: Storage Simulators for Your Homelab

In Part 2 of the Homelab Considerations series, we’ll be talking about storage simulators. Storage simulators will help you familiarize yourself with various enterprise storage offerings that you would typically see attached to a vSphere environment. We’re going to cover each Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) I’ve been able to find, where and how to download those VSAs, and how to set them up in an environment.

In any virtual environment, you need a few key things:

Servers, or compute
Networking, or routers and switching
Storage, or a centralized box of hard disks to store all of the infrastructure on

If you’re testing an application, OS or the network infrastructure in your environment, you’re probably fine putting the infrastructure on local storage if you have a decently sized hard drive and can thin provision the disk. If you’re in the market to learn how enterprise data centers and cloud technologies work, especially with VMware vSphere, you will need dedicated shared storage for your homelab infrastructure in order to use most of those enterprise features. Not all of us can build out a homelab …

Homelab Considerations: Software Licensing for Your Homelab

July 28, 2018October 23, 2018 Scott Forehand

Part 1: Homelab Considerations: Software Licensing for Your Homelab
Part 2: Homelab Considerations: Storage Simulators for Your Homelab

So I’ve been digging into how to license enterprise software for my homelab, and I thought I’d share some of what I’ve found. Some people choose to go the route of getting below-board licensing for enterprise software, but I’m not one of those people. For those of us who want a legitimate software footprint on their network, this post is for you. We are not going to cover how to build your homelab, or what storage you should use. We are going to cover how to license your homelab at little or no cost to you, including your choices for legally licensing products from VMware, Microsoft, Veeam and more.

VMware Licensing

Let’s start the conversation by talking about VMware, since virtualization is the main focus of this blog. While VMware does offer their ESXi hypervisor for free, that doesn’t include some of the enterprise features like access to APIs, and the rest of the vSphere suite. In terms of licensing, the cheapest way to get a production copy of VMware for an enterprise is vSphere Essentials, which costs $560 at the …

vSphere 5.5 and vSAN 5.5 End of General Support Reminder

July 9, 2018July 9, 2018 Scott Forehand

I thought I’d take a moment to remind everyone that the End of General Support (EOGS) for vSphere 5.5 and vSAN 5.5 is September 19, 2018.

VMware recommends that anyone still running those versions of the software upgrade to vSphere 6.5 or vSphere 6.7 as soon as possible to maintain your full level of Support and Subscription Services. Upgrading to vSphere 6.5 or 6.7 will put you in a good spot, and give you all of the latest capabilities of vSphere and vSAN. VMware has announced that vSphere 6.5 and vSphere 6.7 general support has been extended to five years from it’s release date, which will end on November 15, 2021.

Note: vCloud Suite 5 and vSphere with Operations Management (vSOM) customers running vSphere 5.5 are also recommended to upgrade to vSphere 6.5 or vSphere 6.7.

Visit the VMware vSphere Upgrade Center for more information on the benefits of upgrading and how to upgrade from vSphere 5.5 to vSphere 6.5 or vSphere 6.7. If you’re looking for detailed technical guidance, visit vSphere Central and the vSphere 6.5 Topology and Upgrade Planning Tool.

If you need a little bit of help upgrading to a newer version of vSphere, VMware …

Category: Virtualization