IT Systems Engineering
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Avocent UMG 4000 problems
ok so we we just bought a new KVM, a Avocent UMG 4000. I am very unhappy to report that we have multiple problems with this device. I have opened multiple tickets to get these issues resolved with Avocent’s tech support. The good thing is that the tech support is responsive and helpful. However, I feel that these are basic things which should work right out of the box for any KVM. The old Avocents we had worked fine, for over a decade! These basic KVM features work fine even in $50 KVM switches. This UMG 4000 is a $10,000 dollar product! Needless to say, I am VERY disappointed with…
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Fix “missing” VM status in VMM
OK so here is a tricky problem with an easy fix. Sometimes, in SC VMM 2012 some of my VMs are shown as “missing”. I cannot do anything to them using VMM. An easy fix is to fire up FCM (Failover Cluster Manager) and live migrate or quick migrate the VM (depending upon whether the VM is running or not). After that VMM will immediately refresh the VMs state to the correct one….stopped or running. Problem: Solution:
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VM Additions not detected?
From time to time, I run into this issue with our Hyper-V environment. No matter how many times I upgrade the VM additions, SCVMM still is not able to detect it. It always ends up saying “not detected”. Eventually I noticed that one of the the 6 Hyper-V related services which are usually running on the VM was having some trouble – the heartbeat service. Hmmm…that makes sense! If I tried to start this service, I got the following error: Error 1083: The executable program that this service is configured to run in does not implement the service. While doing some searching on the net, I found out the…
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What is Driver Locked memory?
I noticed that one of my VMs (on Hyper-V 2012) was using a lot of RAM. Strangely, there was no application which was using that much RAM. It was using 14.2/16 GB RAM. At that time task manager showed this: And this in the details tab: Notice that Oracle was using only 1.8GB and that was the highest user. Even if I total everything, it still was nowhere near 14 GB used. What was using all that RAM?
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Easy, free VBScript debugging
As sys-admins we have to write scripts. Although the new thing is PowerShell, we still have a lot of old legacy scripts in VBScript. I was searching for an easy way to debug a VBScript, the way software developers do it using an IDE… but I do not want to install the whole Visual Studio package. Sure there are non Microsoft tools to do it, but I could not find a good, free one. After a lot of trials and tribulations, I found the easy way to debug a VBScript: Install MS debugger. (download it from here). Yes it is super old, but still works, I tested it on Windows…