How to remove or uninstall the HP Network Configuration Utility

I recently had to virtualize a few racks of HP DL380 G3 servers which I haven’t had to do for years and remembered how annoying some of the HP applications on these servers can be. One of the applications that you won’t be able to uninstall via the Add/Remove Programs is the HP Network Configuration Utility as shown in the following screenshot:

Opening the utility shows there isn’t an option to disable or uninstall:

The way to uninstall it is to actually open the NIC’s properties begin by open the Network Connections window:

Open the properties of a NIC:

Highlight the HP Network Configuration Utility line item and click on the Uninstall button:

You will be asked to reboot upon completing the uninstall:

Proceed to restart the server:

The HP Network Configuration Utility should no longer be in the system tray once the server has restarted:

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Newly P2V / VMware Converter converted HP DL series server hangs on Windows startup

It has probably been 4 or 5 years since I’ve had to P2V old HP DL380 G3 servers with Windows Server 2003 but a recent datacenter virtualization project I’ve been involved in had 2 full racks of them. Going through the motions of virtualizing the servers with VMware Converter brought back good memories as well as reminded me of all the issues I’ve had in the past with these servers where one of them was when a newly converted server would hang at various startup phases for hours and seemingly never really load the operating system properly.

Observe the first screenshot of the:

Please wait…

Preparing network connections…

… process. I could walk around from the virtual machine for an hour, come back and still see this screen being the same. The next screenshot:

Please wait…

Loading your personal settings…

… comes after you’re able to log in and also seemingly takes hours until it loads into the blue desktop wallpaper. In any event, you could wait for hours or days and the server wouldn’t boot or load any faster. I still remember the first time I came across this 5 years ago and how frustrating it was so in hopes that I can save someone else’s frustration, the way to fix this is to restart Windows in safe mode then open the services console as such:

From here, disable all of the HP services so that they don’t start. Notice that you may be prompted with a Found New Hardware Wizard but you should just ignore it because it will go away when you install VMware tools.

Once all the HP services have been disabled, proceed by restarting the server and you should notice that the boot and login times will revert back to normal. Once in the OS, perform the post virtualization cleanup process (remove unneeded applications, hidden devices that no longer exist, etc.

Pre/Post tasks for P2V-ing a physical host to a virtual machine

Throughout the years that I’ve been involved with virtualizing environments, I’ve realized that there are actually many pre and post tasks that should be completed when virtualizing a physical host.  While I always had scattered notes that I referred to for these projects, it was not until 2 years ago when I combined mine with the notes of my current practice lead.  The following list probably doesn’t cover everything but should serve as a good start:

**Note: Sorry about the images.  I have the tables in an email but it doesn’t paste properly in Windows Live Writer.

Hot Cloning

Cold Cloning 

Cloning Process

Completion of Cloning

“Unable to obtain hardware information for the selected machine” with vCenter Converter 4.x

I’ve been meaning to get some screenshots of this problem because I’ve been asked about this error a few times and since I had some P2V work tonight with a client that had the setup I needed, I took the opportunity to mimic this error on their vSphere environment.  Now before I proceed, please be aware that the reason to this error message in this blog post is only ONE of the MANY possibilities so if this does not apply to your situation, I would suggest that the converter logs be exported and parsed to determine the root cause.

Problem

You need to v2v a virtual machine currently sitting on a VMware Server 1.0 or 2.0 so you proceed with logging into vCenter with the vCenter Converter installed, right click on your cluster, choose Import and then choose VMware Workstation or other VMware virtual machine for the Select source type field.  You browse to the network path for the vmx file, enter the credentials to connect to the share but once you click on View source details, you receive the following error:

Unable to obtain hardware information for the selected machine

Resolution

One of the reasons why you would get this error is if the virtual machine is powered on.  This conversion process requires the source to be powered off and if you would like to virtualize it live, you should install the converter agent on the virtual machine and live clone it.  Once you’ve shutdown the virtual machine, you should see something similar to the following:

For further troubleshooting, you can click on the Export diagnostic logs… link at the bottom left hand corner to extract a zip package with line by line information about the failure.

VMware Converter P2V Error on Windows 2000 Server with Snapshot Failure

A client contacted us for help while trying to P2V a Cisco Unity server but keep getting the following error after the process successfully starts and fails:

Conversion process failed @ 2:10pm (2010-04-09 14:10:17.174 'P2V' 6104 error] [task,295] Task failed: P2VError SNAPSHOT_FAILURE(-1))

The first question I asked them was what operating system the server was and when they said it was Windows 2000, I asked them if they had rebooted the server after installing the agent. They indicated that they did not get prompted but I remembered that I always got prompted so I had them try to reboot the server and also ensure the service account had administrative privileges.

A few days later the client got back to me and said a reboot did indeed fix the problem.