After how woefully lacking in detail for the novice in OS 10 switches the Dell documentation is below is a little snippet that can be used to configure your switches with what appears to be enough permission for PRTG (or a similar SNMP monitoring system) to keep an eye on them. After entering configuration mode a readonly view with a… Read more
Tag: Dell
Server Room – The latest
Work is coming along nicely with the Server Room, we’ve now removed the last Cisco switch from our infrastructure and the HP 5400R series switch is deployed replacing the 2530 that was in its place; over time we’ll be bringing more fibre from our edge switches into this room as well hence the number of SFP+ ports on the 5400R…. Read more
Dell T430 Castors – what do they look like?
Having recently purchased a Dell T430 tower server which we will be using for backup and Hyper-V replica I thought I’d share some photos of what the castors (an option in place of either the rack mounting kit or the floor stand feet) look like! The castor assembly comes in a separate box to the server and only takes a… Read more
Server Room Progress – Photos
With the front to back patch panel installed and T430s rack mounted the server room is coming along quite nicely. Next up will be a tidy up of the cables at the back of the rack bringing all of the power cables to one side and the network cables to the other. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks!
Rack Mounting a Dell PowerEdge T430 – where do I put the rails in relation to the 5U of space?
As part of an ongoing project to improve the room today we’ve been installing a set of rails for a pair of Dell PowerEdge T430 servers. You may have noticed the ‘T’ in the T430 to indicate they are tower servers but Dell provides a 5U rack conversion kit which is pretty easy to install. One small question came up… Read more
Requesting a CSR from Dell iDRAC gives you a blank file
A interesting quirk of an issue with this one; when generating a CSR to secure the iDRAC (version 8) interface on a Dell T430 server it appears that you can’t use an apostrophe in any of the fields else you are presented with a empty/blank csr.txt file (see right). The work around is simple if a little annoying (especially when CSRs… Read more
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 end to end deployment – Install Hyper-V Server
In this post I’ll be going through the installation of Hyper-V Server on our Dell T430 hosts. Remember you can download and use Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 for free (link) however you must still license the guest Operating Systems. I’ll be configuring a 80GB partition for the OS with the remainder of the storage set aside for the virtual machines… Read more
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 end to end deployment – Dell iDRAC configuration
In this post I will be covering the basic configuration of iDRAC as well as getting ready for the installation of Windows Hyper-V Server 2012 R2. In this server configuration I have plugged a network cable into port 1 of the on-board NIC which will (initially) be used to host iDRAC, the management connection for the OS as well as… Read more
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 end to end deployment – Project Goals + Hardware
Time for a new series of posts! In this series I will be looking at the end to end deployment of a pair of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 hosts along with supporting services including networking and backup. This kind of deployment is an excellent option for anyone who is looking to run Virtualisation but without the cost of VMWare… Read more
Knackered your iDRAC 8 web console by uploading a Custom SSL Certificate Signing Certificate? – Fix
A bit of an interesting one today; while provisioning a pair of shiny new Dell T430s I had obtained and uploaded a valid 3rd party signed SSL certificate to the iDRAC interface with a view to ensuring that whenever an administrator accessed the interface they didn’t get a invalid certificate warning. However after uploading the certificate and restarting iDRAC I was presented… Read more