The IT Crownd

Recently an odd thing happened on the way to The Forum.  We are still trying to figure out why these things happened however the upshot was that we lost connectivity to our OCS server. The trouble with OCS is that it is one of those technologies which is quite involved yet once put in properly it also just works.  This has the double nightmare of when things go wrong they are normally something you have seen before but can't remember and also require you to relearn all that you forgot - remembering the best way of learning is making mistakes....so yes you do all the same mistakes again. Well that's what happens if you don't write things down.  So I am. First thing I did was reboot the box as to my knowledge nothing had changed.  Can you see where this is going? Red Herring:   Still no joy so I checked the services for OCS and they wouldn't start, the event log showed that our evaluation license for OCS Enterprise has expired.  Great.  So...

<RANT ON> VMWare documentation is pretty poor at the best of times (see the replacing the self signed certificate documentation for confirmation) and registering a simple plug in is also one of them. There is pretty much no "easy" way of doing this.  However the documents do not really tell you this. <RANT OFF> Google to the rescue and a rather naff looking but effective application by the name of... Plugin Wizard for vSphere vCenter let the naffness begin!  From http://www.virtualizeplanet.com/ . Rubbish interface (tab groups anyone?) and unwieldy name aside this was the ONLY application/script/cmdlet that I could find (in a days browsing) that actually did what it should...or more to the point what I needed. The first "Step" is to make an xml file describing your plugin to vSphere, I didn't use this application to do this as this is pretty easy and notepad is miles better...however "step 2" is something which none of the other w...