Thursday, June 11, 2015

Comparison of VMware NSX training prices around the world

So, I'm trying to organise NSX training, and have found some regional differences in course prices.

VMware NSX: Install, Configure, Manage [V6.0]
Online - $4125 USD + Tax, or 15 credits
Sydney, Australia - $5140 AUD or 35 credits
Tokyo, Japan - $3300 USD + Tax, or 42 credits
Wellington, New Zealand - $2996 USD + Tax, or 38 credits
Singapore - $2400 USD + Tax, or 30 credits
Selangor, Malaysia - $2400 USD + Tax, or 30 credits
Bangkok, Thailand - $1500 USD + Tax, or 15 credits
Jakarta, Indonesia - $1200 USD + Tax, or 15 credits
Beijing, China - $976 USD + Tax, or 13 credits
Yagon, Myanmar - $824 USD + Tax, or 11 credits
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam - $824 USD + Tax, or 11 credits
Mumbai, India - $824 USD + Tax, or 11 credits

VMware NSX for Internetworking Experts Fast Track [V6.0]
Online (Chicago) - $5012 USD + Tax, or 63 credits
Online (London) - € 3744.00 (EUR) + Tax (if applicable), 58 credits
Hamburg, Germany - € 3744.00 (EUR) + Tax (if applicable), 58 credits
Rueil-Malmaison, France - € 3744.00 (EUR) + Tax (if applicable), 58 credits
Nieuwegein, The Netherlands - € 3744.00 (EUR) + Tax (if applicable), 58 credits
London, United Kingdom - £ 3512.00 (GBP) + Tax (if applicable), 58 credits
Madrid, Spain - € 2808.00 (EUR) + Tax (if applicable), 44 credits
Singapore - $3696 USD + Tax, or 47 credits
Bangkok - $1848 USD + Tax, or 24 credits
Makati City, Philippines - $1848 USD + Tax, or 24 credits

Lessons
  • VMware have price segmentation across the world: Oceania, Europe, United States, Asia 1 (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand), Asia 2 (Indonesia), Asia 3 (China), Asia 4 (Myanmar, Vietnam, India).
  • IT training in a foreign country helps you focus better as you're alone and in a vulnerable state. It pushes you out of your comfort zone and allows you to immerse yourself in the learning experience.
  • Training + flights + hotels in a foreign country can often be cheaper than doing training locally! 

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

The 7th Guest: Placing eight queens on a chess board

On the return leg of my Narita to Sydney flight, I was passing time playing the classic DOS game, The 7th Guest. This game was one of the reasons I spent hundreds of dollars buying a CD-ROM drive! Today, it's available in the iTunes Store and the Google Play Store for a fraction of the cost. Today, the only way you'd spend a hundred dollars on this game would be from excess charges on a bad cellular plan.

The 7th Guest broke new ground in 1993: it was one of the first games to ship on a CD-ROM, and it used every megabyte available! You were treated to full motion video as you walked between the rooms of the beautiful haunted house, which was revolutionary at the time. Bill Gates once described it as "the new standard in interactive entertainment". Gamers around the world (including myself) scared themselves half to death as they wandered around the haunted house, solving puzzles and trying to unlock the mystery of the house.

Rated 15 and above. FOR A VERY GOOD REASON.
Enter the Queen's Puzzle: place 8 Queens on a standard 8x8 chess board such that they can't attack each other.

KHALEESI!!!
If you've read this blog, you'll notice I like chess. One of my old hobbies was writing a chess simulator in C.

Chess in C (Part 1)
Chess in C (Part 2) - Insert Pawn Pun Here
Chess in C (Part 3) - Rook, Rooks, Rookies, Wookies, same thing
Chess in C (Part 4) - I'm asking for input
Chess in C (Part 5) - Potential moves of a bishop: up-left, cardinal, pope

When I saw the Queen's Puzzle, my immediate thinking was to write an app that brute forced the solution. The solution space was fairly limited:

          1. Create a 8x8 board
          2. Place a Queen in position (x,y)
          3. Mark each square reachable by the Queen as attackable
          4. Iterate through the remainder of the board until you reach a square that cannot be attacked
          5. Place a Queen in this square
          6. Go to step 4 and repeat until there are 8 Queens on the board.

For step 2, position (x,y) would start as (1,1).
For step 4, the next square that could not be attacked would be position (x+2, y+1). So, if the first Queen is in (1,1), the next Queen would be placed in (3,2).

Unfortunately, I was on a plane and didn't have access to an IDE so I simulated with pen and paper.

Solving problems the old fashion way: pen, paper and swearing.
Queens placed at (1,1), (2,3), (3,5), (4,7), (5,2), (6,4), (7,6) and DARN IT!
Close, but no cigar! Only seven Queens fit. The algorithm fails at step 4: there are no squares that cannot be attacked. I refined the algorithm with two more steps:

          7. Clear the board
          8. Go to step 2, and place a Queen in the next available square.

This meant that instead of placing the Queen in position (1,1), placing it in position (1,2).

Great success!
I solved it and the returned to the next 7th Guest puzzle: swapping the position of 8 bishops on a 4x5 board. That puzzle was AWFUL.

You want to know what's worse than flying 10 hours on a budget carrier that hates you?
More on that in a later blog post.

But, being stuck on 10 hour NRT-SYD flight I thought...what would happen if the chess board was 3D and had a Z-dimension? If you can place 8 Queens on a chessboard of size 8x8, how many Queens can you place on a chessboard of size x-y-z? There is such thing as 3D chess: one of the more common configurations is the Raumschach board which is a 5x5x5 board. The inventor believed that chess should be like warfare: you can be attacked from the plane you are on, but also from above (aerial) and below (underwater).

Board size reduced from 8x8, otherwise you'd spend
months figuring out whether your move was legal.
I started by drawing a 8x8x3 board to get a ballpark idea of the complexity of the problem. Then I placed the 8 Queens on the top layer, and drew the possible attack spaces throughout the other layers.


After diagramming, it becomes clear that there are lots of places for a Queen to hide on an 8x8x3 board. While the Queen can move diagonally over a Z dimension, it has a weakness: the further you are away on the Z dimension, the more clear spots appear. And it's at that point I fell asleep and enjoyed the rest of my flight. The moral of the story: if you need to burn time on a flight, The 7th Guest as a great time waster. But if you want to have hair when you depart the plane, download the strategy guide as well.

Monday, January 26, 2015

Automating Certificate Signing Requests (CSR) generation for Dell iDRAC

I've been trying to get Puppet to automate the issuing of certificates to the iDRAC (Dell Remote Access Controller) for PowerEdge servers. One of the problems with Dell iDRACs is that on a certain batch of servers, the default key length was too short (1024 bit), rather than the minimum key length required by most Issuing Certificate Authorities (2048 bit).

Bumping the Certificate Signing Request (CSR) key length to 2048 bits requires the use of the racadm.exe utility: there is no way to change the CSR key length from the iDRAC UI, at least not in version 7.

Here are the steps you'll need to automate the generation of CSRs for all new servers that identify themselves as Dell.

Changing the CSR cryptographic key length size

racadm.exe -r dellServer.myCloud.local -u "DRAC_USERNAME" -p "DRAC_PASSWORD" config -g cfgRacSecurity -o cfgRacSecCsrKeySize 2048

Changing the CSR Common Name

racadm.exe -r dellServer.myCloud.local -u "DRAC_USERNAME" -p "DRAC_PASSWORD" config -g cfgRacSecurity -o cfgRacSecCsrCommonName "dellServer.myCloud.local"

Changing the CSR Organisation Name

racadm.exe -r dellServer.myCloud.local -u "DRAC_USERNAME" -p "DRAC_PASSWORD" config -g cfgRacSecurity -o cfgRacSecCsrOrganizationName "BURGER BURGER BURGER Pty Ltd"

Changing the CSR Organization Unit

racadm.exe -r dellServer.myCloud.local -u "DRAC_USERNAME" -p "DRAC_PASSWORD" config -g cfgRacSecurity -o cfgRacSecCsrOrganizationUnit "Security Operations"

Changing the CSR Locality

racadm.exe -r dellServer.myCloud.local -u "DRAC_USERNAME" -p "DRAC_PASSWORD" config -g cfgRacSecurity -o cfgRacSecCsrLocalityName "Sydney"

Changing the CSR State

racadm.exe -r dellServer.myCloud.local -u "DRAC_USERNAME" -p "DRAC_PASSWORD" config -g cfgRacSecurity -o cfgRacSecCsrStateName "NSW"

Changing the CSR Country

racadm.exe -r dellServer.myCloud.local -u "DRAC_USERNAME" -p "DRAC_PASSWORD" config -g cfgRacSecurity -o cfgRacSecCsrCountryCode "AU"

Changing the CSR e-mail address

racadm.exe -r dellServer.myCloud.local -u "DRAC_USERNAME" -p "DRAC_PASSWORD" config -g cfgRacSecurity -o cfgRacSecCsrEmailAddr "pki@burgerburgerburger.com"

Resetting the iDRAC unit

racadm.exe -r dellServer.myCloud.local -u "DRAC_USERNAME" -p "DRAC_PASSWORD" racreset soft

Generating the CSR

racadm.exe -r dellServer.myCloud.local -u "DRAC_USERNAME" -p "DRAC_PASSWORD" sslcsrgen -g -f "C:\temp\dellServer.mycloud.local.csr"

Once you've approved the CSR, you'll get a nice minted certificate you can use to eliminate those pesky iDRAC errors. It should look something like this (if you're using Chrome on OSX)


I've blacked out the Issuing CA details, but all the details in the certificate Subject Name
match with the script above.

Some other areas that you may want to automate in your environment include
  • Configuration of SNMP (for hardware alerting)
  • Uploading the certificate
  • Renaming the default iDRAC user account and setting a strong password
  • Disabling features that are not required
  • Changing the default IPMI key
Remember, once you've automated it for one server, the next 1000 servers are easy!

One caveat: I think iDRAC is unstable or has a memory leak: generating a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) only works reliably if you reset the iDRAC beforehand. Once I added this step in, the CSR generation process became more reliable.

Friday, January 23, 2015

Certificate Templates not appearing in Windows Server 2012 R2-based Microsoft Certificate Authority (CertUtil error 0x80070057)

You may have created some certificate templates in your Microsoft Certificate Authority (CA), such as a template for your VMware hosts. Derek Seaman has a good blog post on the exact settings and extensions required.

After creating a certificate template, I had a problem enabling it in the CA. While the certificate template appeared in the Certificate Templates console, it couldn't be enabled. The certificate template just wasn't appearing in the Certification Authority MMC snapin.

It appears in Certificate Templates..

...but you can't enable it. Because it doesn't appear.
IT JUST DOESN'T APPEAR. WHY??!?!?!?!?!?!?!
WHERE ARE THE ERROR MESSAGES MICROSOFT?!?!?!?

I tried using the certutil.exe command to enable the certificate template manually

certutil.exe -SetCATemplates VMware-SSL

Unfortunately, same problem: certificate template wasn't enabled, but this time I got a deceptive and nonsensical error message complaining that the "parameter" was "incorrect".

CertUtil: -SetCATemplates command FAILED: 0x80070057 (WIN32: 87 ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER).
CertUtil: The parameter is incorrect.



When you create a certificate template, it needs time to replicate to all domain controllers. A certificate template is just another object in Active Directory, just like a user or computer account. So if the certificate template doesn't appear immediately, just wait the same amount of time you'd wait for a user to replicate across your DCs.

Back to our problem: why isn't the certificate template appearing? Well, it turns out that every online certificate enrolment service has to have contacted Active Directory and downloaded the certificate templates before it can be enabled. If you've previously configured an issuing CA and then destroyed it without cleaning up its entries, you'll never be able to enable the certificate template.

Performing a cleanup of issuing CAs in Active Directory Certificate Services

It's ADSI Edit Time!

Open ADSI Edit and connect to the Configuration context.

Select a well known Naming Context like Configuration, or Paul, or Jimmy.
If you see the names of OUs, you connected to the wrong context.

Navigate to CN=Certification Authorities,CN=Public Key Services,CN=Services,CN=Configuration in your domain.

CN=Certification Authorities contains your root CAs and CN=Enrollment Services contains your issuing CAs. If there are any extra CAs listed that no longer exist, you'll need to delete them.


In my case, I had an additional issuing CA in CN=Enrollment Services that no longer existed. When I deleted the CA, I could enable the template.

Yes!

But I want to do everything from the command line because I want to use Server Core in the future.

Now you understand why the original error message "The Parameter is incorrect" is deceptive.
This is the same command that was run last time.

Unfortunately there are no event log error messages for this error. Microsoft just expect you to figure it out.

Monday, January 12, 2015

Errors installing VMware ESXi dump collector: it's probably your complex password!

The VMware ESXi dump collector installer has some vague error messages.

Error 1: Login failed due to a bad user name or password.

"Login probably failed due to a bad user name or password" would
be a more accurate error message.
Causes

  • The username is incorrect.I'm assuming you've verified the username and password are correct. If you haven't done this, try logging into Windows with the credentials and see if they are valid.
  • The user account does not permission in vCenter.Ensure the user account has permissions in vCenter. For the duration of troubleshooting, you may wish to give the user account administrative access. If you look at the netdump-reg-debug.txt file, you can see the following error.

    ERROR:ndreg-app:error: cannot connect to VC -- (vim.fault.NoPermission) {
       dynamicType = <unset>,
       dynamicProperty = (vmodl.DynamicProperty) [],
       msg = 'Permission to perform this operation was denied.',
       faultCause = <unset>,
       faultMessage = (vmodl.LocalizableMessage) [],
       object = 'vim.Folder:group-d1',
       privilegeId = 'System.View'
    }
  • Your password contains the special character "VMware haven't escaped parameters correctly. Remove the " from your password and try again.


Error 2: Error 29457. A specified parameter was not correct.


Of the 30,000 error messages, I received error 29457.

Causes

  • Your password contains the character ;Fool me once, shame on you. If you look at the vminst.txt log file, you'll see something like

    esxiInstUtil: 01/12/15 13:06:12 ExecuteCmd::Cmd:  --register --address "vc.cloudlab.local" --user "svcvmwaredump@cloudlab.local" --password "*****" -s "vUq<~[" --thumbprint "C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware ESXi Dump Collector\vmconfig-netdump.xml"

    The passwords I use are generated by a password management tool, which makes long non-sensical passwords with lots of special characters like !@#$%^&*();. Unfortunately, VMware haven't properly escaped the password field so installation will fail if the password contains the character ;

    In this case, my password was JI@$QH$7*@eie$Hhg8;vUq<~[. The installer thinks my password is JI@$QH$7*@eie$Hhg8, ignored the ;  and has left the vUq<~[ dangling.