When VMW says that vCenter needs a static IP

They mean it.

vSphere 4.1 upgrade gotchas

For any of you thinking about building a new vCenter on a 64 bit OS so you can upgrade to 4.1, you should just export your database and import it on another machines. This is especially true if you use vDS's (vNetwork Distributed Switch), remember that these are stored on the vCenter and will continue to work on the ESX hosts, but will be difficult to modify/import/recreate on your new vCenter 4.1 server. To compound this difficult situation, if you are using iSCSI to reach your shared storage you will be in more deep stuff.

If you find yourself in this scenario, and you know what you named your previous vDS's, PortGroups, etc.. you may be able to recreate it without much difficulty. It gets more difficult when your using 8+ nic's per ESX Host. If you just need to start from scratch, it'll take a reboot or two of your ESX hosts (especially if you use EVC CPU masking) to get everything ripped out so you can start over again.

Remove Non-Present Devices from Device Manager

After you P2V something, there are alot of old hardware devices that no longer exist, but you can’t see them by default, this article tells you how to see them so you can remove them.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315539

Upgrade iLo on a whole HP chassis

log into HP OBA with SSH

run

update ilo all tftp://x.x.x.x/ilo2_200.bin

wait 10 minutes

How to upgrade Cisco 9124 NX-OS

This is pretty simple, but for some reason hard to google4.

1) download the latest Kickstart and System image from cisco.com

2) tftp, or whatever method you like get the image onto the Cisco

3) Run this on cisco console in “config” mode

a) boot kickstart bootflash:/m9100-s2ek9-kickstart-mz.5.0.1a.bin

b) boot system bootflash:/m9100-s2ek9-mz.5.0.1a.bin

4) Save your Config, Reboot the Switch..and your done.

NOTES: 

You probably don’t want to skip versions, i.e. 3-5 directly. 

You can probabaly only hold 2 versions at a time, so if your on 3, upload 4, upgrade to 4, delete 3, then upload 5, update to 5, rinse, wash, repeat.