Boudewijn Plomp

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Troubleshoot NICs (left behind in registry)

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Symptoms:

At customers I have noticed that sometimes problems occur with network interfaces in Windows, either physical or virtual network interfaces. Having one or more of the following symptoms:

  • A static IP Address cannot be used because (accoring to Windows) it is already in use. But there is no sign of a NIC with that specific IP Address.
  • A static Default Gateway on the TCP/IP properties of your NIC is lost after reboot or directly after you apply the TCP/IP settings.
  • The label “Local Area Network 2” or “Ethernet 2” cannot be renamed to “Local Area Network” or “Ethernet” because (according to Windows) that name already exists.
  • A network interface is detected and shown in Device Manager as <interface-name> #2, whereas it is the only interface.

These symptoms occur when settings are left behind in the registry. Which is often caused by human error, incorrectly removing a NIC (Network Interface Card) interface, or using an OS image on another machine. Of course there is no one to blame, what seems so simple is sometimes overlooked. Troubleshooting these symptoms can take a lot of time. But in fact they are quit easy to solve. With this blog I hope to make you aware about what you should (not) do when removing or re-adding a NIC. And if you encounter such symptoms, how to solve it.  [Read more…]

My first FlexPod! (Part 1 – Introduction)

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This is part 1 of the following blog series:

Introduction:

Two years ago I had the opportunity to design, develop and implement a new public and private cloud infrastructure. Because we were going to host multiple customers (tenants) including our selves on a shared infrastructure this required a Secure Multi-Tenancy environment. As you may probably know, a Secure Multi-Tenancy environment brings a lot of challenges that you have to deal with. We were going to use Microsoft Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 R2 and SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager) 2012 R2 as the virtualization platform. Because it was going to be a private and public cloud service it required the right hardware that is highly scalable. At that time we looked at DELL, HP and Cisco for compute, network and storage. At the end we pulled the plug and chose for a Cisco FlexPod solution. And this is where it all started…

Well, I can tell you now; Cisco FlexPod is awesome! Now that we have our infrastructure running for about two years I am so enthusiastic about this system that is literally made a kind of career shift for me. I am not going totally for Cisco instead of Microsoft, but more a combination of both. As we would say, best of both worlds! And this already brought me a lot of new opportunity’s. Because I am so enthusiastic about a Cisco FlexPod (or better known as Cisco UCS with NetApp) I get a lot of questions from people around me. That’s why I decided to write this blog, to share my experience and hopefully make other people as enthusiastic as me. Did I just say the word ‘enthusiastic’ four times? 😉

If you are interested in this topic than I recommend you to read this blog. Please understand that there are so many things to write about and that I can’t go into too much detail on each topic. I have chosen only a few topics that might be interesting. You can expect more blogs from me that go into more technical detail. So, stay tuned… [Read more…]