Curtis Wright's SysAdmin Blog

I was working on installing iDRAC for an ESX host, and ran into a little trouble. Here's a small guide for the steps to do it. Googling it leads you to this article: https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/us/en/04/idrac-service-module-v3.1/ism_3.1_users_guide/using-the-vsphere-cli?guid=guid-1606fa9a-19ad-4394-a65f-72fb0312a2c7&lang=en-us I didn't think this was clear enough, so here's some pictures too When you are inside of iDRAC, you will see this: Download the iSM installer. Next: Create a Folder inside a datastore Upload the ZIP you downloaded from iDRAC Enable SSH and ESXCLI inside the host SSH into the host CD to the directory Actual command I ran: esxcli software vib install -d /vmfs/volumes/5d135ad3-ff5e8e7c-6d02-e4434b77b398/ISOs/ISM-Dell-Web-3.4.0-VIB-ESX6i-Live.zip Even though it says you don't need to restart, you will need to get iDRAC to recognize it.

We had an issue recently that was low priority, but still annoying. When a network outage would occur, the ESXi hosts running 6.5 would not reconnect to vCenter, both running 6.5 and 6.7. The ham-fisted approach was to restart the host, but that caused downtime for the VMs. All the articles I found said to restart the management agents, but that did not work. We could log in to the host just fine, and all VMs were running without issues, so we knew the issue wasn't with the host. I finally figured it out because I SSHed into both vCenter and then the host, and the host could ping vCenter but vCenter couldn't ping the host. However it could ping everything else in that site so its wasn't a routing issue. And I knew that if restarting the host fixed the issue, it wasn't on vCenter's side. The fix is to restart the management network directly on the ESXi host, using the DCUI. To do so, enable SSH on the host via the web client UI, SSH to the host, login, launch d...