Today I worked. No breaks, almost no emails (like, seven maybe), no phone calls, no meetings, no chit-chat watercooler stuff, barely had lunch (a sandwich from home) – while I worked. From 8:30 AM straight through to 6:30 PM, and I am tired. I got a LOT done.
- I located two possible rack shelves to use, since I need to install one more shelf int the roll around rack I am stuffing with hardware. Neither was a good fit, but I then found the exact type I needed in another rack. It was supposed to have been removed anyway, so I did it, adjusted the mounting brackets and seaching for missing screws before finally mounting it where I wanted.
- I updated the VLAN configs on my Cisco 6509 to account for some new changes I had come up with. I had to do some minor repatching of my existing ESX servers afterwards.
- I helped another team diagnose a Layer-2 loop problem (didn’t take long).
- Next came two legacy 2U servers (old HP DL 308 G3s). I had to pull them apart and remove the three 100BaseT NICs in each of them. Then I had to scavenge six Intel 1000BaseT NICs from three old IBM 1U servers that are going away (we have a stack of them, so I will probably be making another trip for more NICs later). After installing the cards, I stacked them on the new shelf (waaayyy up high), connected the KVM and power, and popped an ESX install CD into each.
- I loaded ESX on each server using my standard configuration, cabled up all the network cards, rebooted.
- I imported a 287 GB server image onto a new 81 GB VM in my ESX cluster.
- I helped yet another team get into their HP blade server chassis switches (didn’t take long).
- I KVM’d into each new server and hand configured everything from the command line, making new vswif interfaces, vswitches, portgroups, and vmknics. This took forever – as soon as I get more time, I am making my own kickstart script to do this stuff for me. I have three vswitches, four vswif interfaces, and four vmknics. Two vswitches have four portgroups each, and the other has, uh, <doing math in head> 22 portgroups. Most are not used, but are there for uniformity and flexibility.
- I updated all my documentation and posted the newest updates on the rack doors (front and back).
- I worked with our LAN admin to set some routes up for some new networks I will be using, and updated the static routes in my Foundry switch tying my networks to his.
- I spent the rest of my time troubleshooting why these two new servers cannot talk to most networks, but can talk to a couple. I am so tired from typing in commands, vlan IDs, etc., I can’t think straight. I bet I dorked up some VLAN tags on the vswitches or mispatched something. I checked all the cables meticulously to ensure I had good link on everything, and sure enough, there were loose cables. I confirmed everything was good on the physical layer with esxcfg-nics -l. Default routes look good. Just so much stuff to keep track of…
I am still not done with one server, not quite. But tomorrow I’ll tackle it and these problems with both, and maybe grab a few more NICs for later. Kinda sucks having no help, but oh well. It’ll still get done.
I also need to make templates within ESX, so I have to start copying ISOs to install from. That can happen tomorrow too. Just a fairly typical workday. Oh, and my boss put me in charge of a portion of a big project I am building all this stuff for. Bonus.
I need a beer….
Filed under: /dev/urandom, Hardware, KVM, VMWare | Tagged: Cisco, ESX, Foundry, network, rack, router, server, switch, tagging, VLAN, VMWare, work | 2 Comments »