Hardware & VCLI Commands

There might be a few reasons that you would need to do this. But if you need to locate the Serial Number of server or Service Tag of your Dell server you can do this from the service console command line.  In the past I have needed this to schedule service and also to confirm the identity of a server for the Vendor that was on site. In case you do not have a database to reference or maybe someone mistyped the digits you can always fall back to this method.

[root@host name]#  /usr/sbin/dmidecode |grep -A4 “System Information”

I have grabbed a list of the new commands added to vCLI 4.1, these command will help narrow the gap that had existed between what you could run on the ESX console (COS) and what you could do via the vCLI with an ESXi host. Notice the part at the end where it lists some of the commands that cannot be executed against a vCenter server for a host in lock down mode.

• vicfg-hostops – Allows you to examine, stop, and reboot hosts and to instruct hosts to enter and exit maintenance mode.
• vicfg-authconfig – Allows you to add an ESX/ESXi host to an Active Directory domain, remove the host, and list Active Directory domain information.
• vicfg-ipsec – Supports IPsec setup.

vSphere CLI 4.1 also includes the following new functionality:

• The following options have been added to esxcli:
  • esxcli swiscsi session – Manage iSCSI sessions.
  • esxcli swiscsi nic – Manage iSCSI network interfaces.
  • esxcli swiscsi vmknic – List VMkernel network interfaces available for binding to particular iSCSI adapter.
  • esxcli swiscsi vmnic – List available uplink adapters for use with a specified iSCSI adapter.
  • esxcli vaai device – Display information about devices claimed by the VMware VAAI (vStorage APIs for Array Integration) Filter Plugin.
  • esxcli corestorage – List devices or plugins. Used in conjunction with hardware acceleration.
  • esxcli network – List active connections or list active ARP table entries.
  • esxcli vms – List and forcibly stop virtual machines that do not respond to normal stop operations.
• Some of the parity issues between vSphere CLI and the ESX service console have been resolved.
• You can now run vCLI commands using SSPI (--passthroughauth) against both vCenter Server and ESX/ESXi systems.
• Lockdown mode allows vSphere administrators to block direct access to ESXi systems. With lockdown mode enabled, all operations must go through a vCenter Server system. The following commands cannot run against vCenter Server systems and can therefore not be used in lockdown mode:
  • vicfg-snmp
  • vifs
  • vicfg-user
  • vicfg-cfgbackup
  • vihostupdate
  • vmkfstools
  • esxcli
  • vicfg-ipsec
If you want to run these commands against an ESXi system, turn off lockdown mode using the vSphere Client.

Windows 2003 and 2008 Server

Hi

There are major changes in windows 2003 & 2008 Server with new features,i  am expecting this would help for you ...... 

Windows 2003 Server	Windows 2008 Server
RIS	WDS-Windows Deployment Services
IIS 6.0	IIS 7.0
DFS	Changes in DFS
4-Primary Partitions	3-Primary Partitions
No Shrinking Volumes	Shrinking Volumes
No network discovery service	Network Discovery service
No RODC	RODC
No in built GPMC	Inbuilt GPMC
windows NT Backup	windows server Backup
No windows server core	windows server core
Terminal Service-RDP 5.2	Improved Terminal Services-RDP 6.0
DNS	Improved DNS

1. 32 / 64 Bit Operating system. 2. Built on NT Technology 3. Inbuilt Terminal Services 4. No Primary Domain controller and Backup Domain Controller 5. Transitive trust relationship automatically created 6. Active Directory 7. Secondary Logon Services 8. Improved Security – Kerberos Version5 9. Distributed File System (DFS) 10. Freedom from drive letters 11. Centralized deployment of applications 12. Only DNS required no need for WINS 13. Remote Installation service 14. Supports FAT 16, Fat 32, NTFS and EFS 15. Internet Information services (IIS) 16. Volume shadow copy 17. Quality of service 18. Disk Quotas

1. 32 / 64 Bit Operating system. 2. Server Manager 3. Active Directory   -- Domain Services  -- Federation Services  -- Lightweight Directory Services  -- Rights Management Services  -- Read-only Domain Controller 4. In-built GPMC 5. Centralized deployment of applications 6. Disk Quotas 7. Distributed File System (DFS) 8. Windows Server Backup 9. DNS Dependency 10. Internet Information services (IIS) 11. Improved Terminal Services       --Ts web Access Administration       --Ts Remote App       --Ts Gateway 12. Windows Deployment Services 13. Support FAT16, FAT32, NTFS 14. Windows Server Core 15. Volume Shadow Copy 16. Network Access Protection 17. Virtualization 18. Windows Power Shell 19. Improved Security      -- Kerberos Version5      -- Internet Protocol Security      -- Support for smart card

please update me if there is any problems via comments or to my mail id :satishchirala@gmail.com