SHIFT-WIKI - Sjoerd Hooft's InFormation Technology
This WIKI is my personal documentation blog. Please enjoy it and feel free to reach out through blue sky if you have a question, remark, improvement or observation. See below for the latest additions, or use the search or tags to browse for content.
AIX Root Password Policy
Summary: ALthough AIX is by now on version 7.3 I find these old pages so fascinating I decided to keep them. On this page I'll show you how to work with your root password once you've configured your users to authenticate with ldap. This page is for AIX 5.3 and AIX 6.1.
Date: Between 2010-2013
Refactor: 21 December 2024: Checked formatting.
VMware BIOS Options
Summary: How to configure boot options on vSphere VMs.
Date: Around 2014
Refactor: 1 May 2025: Checked links and formatting.
Do you also think that the boot screen is gone before you know it in VMware. Ever tried to boot into the BIOS and you couldn't do it because the boot screen was already gone when you got control of the keyboard?
This is your solution:
The first setting here is in milliseconds how long the boot screen will stay, but the second one is even more handy. Check the box to make sure the VM boots into bios on next boot. How nice is that!
This wiki has been made possible by:
VMware Alarms
Summary: Information and background on vSphere alarms as well as how to set them up.
Date: Around 2010
Refactor: 1 May 2025: Checked links and formatting.
With the introduction of vSphere 4.0 the possibilities of using Alarms in VMware are greatly improved. This article describes some of the possibilities that are now available while using alarms. We'll go through some of the default defined alarms and customize them to our environment to make sure they do what we want. Note that we'll only use Email Notification in our environment. SNMP traps are also supported, but not used with us.
Since Alarms consists of 4 tabs we'll go through them per tab:
- General
- Naming, description, etc.
- Alarm Type & Trigger
- Monitor for specific condition
- Monitor for specific event
- Enabling Alarm
- Trigger Configuration
- Reporting Configuration
- Range
- Frequency
- Actions
After going through all the options I'll tell you how to configure vCenter for email notification and I'll give you my minimal customizations in the vCenter Alarm Definitions.
Upgrade VM To New Hardware Level 7
Summary: How to upgrade a VMware VM from hardware level 4 to 7.
Date: Around 2011
Refactor: 1 May 2025: Checked links and formatting.
With the introduction of vSphere VMware also introduced a new hardware level for virtual machines, being version 7. The most important reason for me was that with the new hardware version I got a new NIC, vmxnet3. This one is a lot faster that previous ones and wisely accepted in the operating systems we run in our environment. See VMware Change NIC VM Manually on how to change running VMs to use the new network adapter. Of course, first follow this guideline to upgrade the VMware Tools and the VMs hardware version.
Note: This procedure will cost some downtime. Don't do this during business hours.