For all of you out there that have recently started buying the Nortel layer 2-7 Switch Modules for your IBM BladeCenter H because they can be cheaper than there Cisco counterpart with more functionality, check out this article.

It points out how to resolve some of the issues that you may be having with VLANs and ESX. The crux being that by default the Nortel Switch will tag the default VLAN so unless the Service Console is configured with the same VLAN tag, then things get messy. A simple checkbox is all that is required to fix this problem, but check out the article for more information.

A great article on how to enable SSH for ESXi, which if you didn’t already know does not have a Service Console to speak of, but is built on the BusyBox distribution. However, it is still possible to remote manage it using SSH with a tweak here and there.

Here’s the great video that shows you how to do it step by step, but check out the rest of the article for more detail:

I recently came across a problem whereby a Rescan SAN was taking an absolute age, like 15 minutes from the VI Client. Now I love the VI Client, but sometimes it just doesn’t give you enough information when it is doing things. To be fair most of the time the verbose information is simply not needed, but when things go wrong it is a god send.

In comes the Service Console command line, more specifically the esxcfg-rescan and esxcfg-mpath commands.

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