Here is a quick post on generating support logs for DELL cases if you are running VMware ESX(i) on any of the DELL server hardware. I had a CPU alert appear in my vSphere Hardware status and raised a support ticket with DELL. Previously I’ve had to wrestle with the config/setup of the DSET tool on ESX(i) and even had it cause a boot up failures due to a comparability bug.
The Dell tech send me the link below which is a CENTOS LiveCD which can be downloaded and booted up on the server in question.
http://linux.dell.com/files/openmanage-contributions/omsa-70-live/
Once downloaded and attached via the iDRAC Virtual Media Manager you will automatically go through to the desktop where you can double click on the DSET Tool Icon. Let it do it’s thing and gather all the relevant info which is then packaged into a zip file under \tmp\data\
Ok, so now that you have the file…how do you get it off the LiveCD instance? The answer would be simple if you had interfaces configured with DHCP, but the majority of these servers are configured with NICs on VLAN enabled ports which are not easily switched over or able to be reconfigured without going through change management etc etc.
The Network Configuration GUI in CENTOS doesn’t have the ability to configure VLAN tagging on the interfaces so you need to jump into the shell and manually configure the network settings as shown below.
Create a new config file for eth0 and configure it as shown below…key here is to take note of the MAC Address, no include and IP or Subnet details and I disabled IPv6.
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#vi ifcfg-eth0 |
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DEVICE=eth0 HWADDR=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx ONBOOT=yes BOOTPROTO=none TYPE=Ethernet IPV6INIT=no IPV6_AUTOCONF=no |
Once saved, copy that file and save to ifcfg-eth0.x where is is the VLAN you want the interface to communicate in. This time you are adding relevent IP info along with specifying the device name as eth0.x and VLAN=yes which obviously enabled the VLAN tag config.
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#cp ifcfg-eth0 ifcfg-eth0.x |
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#vi ifcfg-eth0.x |
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DEVICE=eth0.x HWADDR=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx ONBOOT=yes HOTPLUG=no BOOTPROTO=none TYPE=Ethernet VLAN=yes IPADDR=192.168.0.10 NETMASK=255.255.255.0 GATEWAY=192.168.0.1 |
Fire up the new interfaces and restart network and you have a VLAN enabled connection that you can now grab the DSET zip file off and send to DELL for analysis.
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#/sbin/ifup eth0 #/sbin/ifup eth0.x |
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#/sbin/service network restart |
As a side note, being the good VMware fanboy that I am, I used my Octopus Beta service to upload the file and make it available via the Octopus URL for sharing…because getting access to the Horizon Suite BETA is currently near on impossible 🙂
