Using vSphere Host Profiles with 10G and CNA Adapters

I am currently working on a VMware vSphere project that is being built on Cisco UCS blades. The UCS blades have a single dual port CNA that acts as both an HBA and a 10G NIC.

When we tried to apply the host profile built from our reference blade we got this error message “Error during the configuration of the host: Invalid argument: Invalid argument”.

The host profiles log “pyVmomiserver.log” didn’t have any useful information and we couldn’t find anything on the web so opened a case with VMware support.

It turns out this is a known issue with 10G adapters and will be fixed in ESX 4 Update 1. The issue is that the host profile tries to set the speed/duplex of the NIC to auto but since auto isn’t an option for 10G adapters it fails.

To workaround this issue you can edit the host profile and set the NIC speed and duplex to 10000 and full. After we set the NIC speed and duplex the host profile successfully applied to the other hosts.

 

 

 

Synchronizing BlackBerry, Outlook and GMail without a BES Server

My wife recently purchased a BlackBerry Storm and wanted a way to keep her Outlook contacts and calendar in sync with her BlackBerry and Gmail. I did some research and found that it isn’t as easy as I originally thought would be.

A quick Google search pointed my to a free Google application called Google Sync that claims to sync BlackBerry contacts and calendar with Gmail.

This sounded exactly like what I was looking for so I went ahead and installed Google Sync on the BlackBerry and performed a sync. After the sync I had a big mess on my hands, there were duplicates, triplicates and quadruplicates of all of the contacts. I did some research and found that a lot people were having this same issue. Back to square 1.

After we spend a few hours cleaning up the mess I did some more research and found a better solution.

After searching the web and looking at a few different products I came up with a solution using two products;  gSyncit – http://www.daveswebsite.com/software/gsync/ and Handheld Contact – http://outlook.handheldcontact.com/support.php#contact-form

gSyncit synchronizes Outlook Contacts and Calendar with Gmail Contacts and Calendar.

Hendheld Contact synchronizes Outlook Contacts and Calendar with BlackBerry Contacts and Calendar.

gSyncit allows one way or two way synchronization and you can have multiple Outlook profiles syncing with multiple Gmail accounts.

gSyncit has a one time $15 dollar license fee and works with Outlook XP – Outlook 2007 and Windows XP – Windows 7 (32 and 64 bit editions).

Setup and configuration of gSyncit was very simple and didn’t require a reboot.

Handheld Contact is a service that has an annual fee of around $60 dollars. There is client that is installed in Outlook and on the BlackBerry.

The combination of these two products works great. I can add, edit a contact or calendar event in Outlook, Gmail or BlackBerry and it will sync over the air with the other applications.