Archive for June, 2011
Installing Equallogic Multipathing Extension Module (MEM) Plugin for vSphere
Jun 23rd
If you’re using an Equallogic PS series array for your vSphere storage, it is highly recommended to utilize the Equallogic MEM Plugin. Some of the benefits that your environment will reap are:
- Easing iSCSI Setup
- Increasing bandwidth
- Reducing network latency
- Automating load balancing across multiple active paths
- Automating connection management
- Automating failure detection and failover
The following is a walk-through of an example installation. For more details on the steps performed, please consult the Technical Report.
Pre-requisites:
- ESX or ESXi >= 4.1 with Enterprise licensing
- VMware vMA 4.01 or VMware CLI 4.1
- Equallogic array firmware >= 4.3
The following utilizes the vMA to perform the installation. The vMA is an excellent tool, and in addition to help set this up, it can also be used as an excellent ESXi Syslog Server.
- Obtain the zip file containing the setup perl script and the package itself: https://www.equallogic.com/support/download_file.aspx?id=1101. You will need to SCP this over to your vMA server.
- Unzip the file which you scp’d over. Do NOT unzip the zip file inside, which is a VIB offline bundle.
- Place your host into maintenance mode.
More >
Hiding System Drives in Windows
Jun 17th
There are many use cases for hiding system drives, whether it be with View, XenApp, or whatnot. Fortunately, there are already templates in place to accomplish hiding the system drives; it is just a matter of finding them and enabling them. First, you need to create a GPO to restrict access and to actually hide the drives. This will be a User GPO, but it will need to be in the Machine container of the computers in question.
Create a new GPO, browse to User Configuration->Policies->Administrative Templates->Windows Components->Windows Explorer. You will see 2 settings that are pertinent here:
- Hide these specified drives in My Computer
- Prevent access to drives from My Computer
Enable both of these, and select which drives you would like it to apply to.
The tricky part here is that the above is a User GPO, but it is applied to a Machine container. To make this GPO activate, User Group Policy loopback processing mode needs to be enabled. This policy directs the system to apply the set of GPOs for the computer to any user who logs on to the computer. This can be found in Computer Configuration->Policies->Administrative Templates->System->Group Policy.
Once done, restart the servers and test. The following is an example showing Microsoft Visio published through Citrix XenApp.
Before:
After:
By default, this will apply to all users. To disable it for certain users, modify the Security settings of the GPO to not apply to the users in question (Microsoft KB 315675).