Microsoft Office Activation Error: 0x80072EE7

Hi Friends,

Got a good error for you today!  So I've changed the way I'm activating my Office 2010 VDI desktops to use my KMS instead of activating them directly from Microsoft.  The interesting thing about Office is that it's VERY perceptive.  If I change hardware in my VDI environment it knows it immediately and wants to re-activate Office...  I can understand why Microsoft is doing this, but what a pain when I'm just trying to introduce a new blade into my environment!

So I've been experimenting bringing in a new type of blade into my environment and from my past experience I knew Office was going to complain.  This time I was READY!

I opened up Word and sure enough, I get the activation screen.  Okay, so I go to the CLI so I can activate Office.

1.  cd Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14
2.  cscript ospp.vbs /sethst:FQDNofYourKMSServer
3.  cscript ospp.vbs /act

What?!  Error!!

What the heck is error 0x80072EE7?

I ran the script to check the error and here's what I got.

What do you mean you can't resolve the server name?!?!

I pinged my KMS, did an NSLOOKUP, no problem....  Hmmmm....

Well I was outta ideas, so time to head over to my good buddy Google.

I typed in the error and almost nothing....

Ummmm....

I kept searching and I finally found an article on the Microsoft Technet of someone that got the same error message.

This is from the page:

"0x80072EE7:
The server name or address could not be resolved
Source: Winhttp
When you use MAK product keys, the machine must be able to contact MS webservers, to activate.
This error you are getting, suggests that the machine cannot resolve the host for the MS webservers.
If it cannot resolve the name, then it cannot connect, so it cannot activate."

What the heck?  Office needs to contact Microsoft?  Isn't that what my KMS is supposed to do?  In a normal VDI environment you're probably never going to hit this problem because each of the desktops will get it's own DHCP address that will be able to contact Microsoft.  But, since I'm running in an isolated environment my desktops can't contact the outside world.

Sooooo, I had to change my internal NIC to one that could reach the outside world.  Re-ran cscript ospp.vbs /act and everything worked.

D'oh!!

This is probably why I didn't find much information on it, because most people don't hit this error.  Well, if you happen to hit the error, it might be because your desktop can't contact Microsoft.

Until Next Time!
-Brain

Woo Hoo! BrainWavez on The Main Nimble Storage Website!

Hi Friends,

I'm very excited to let you know that BrainWavez is on the main Nimble Storage website again!  This time for BrainWavez Episode 32 - Meet Suresh Vasudevan - Nimble Storage CEO

How cool is that?!?!

If you haven't had a chance to check out this episode, I highly recommend listening when you get a chance.

Brain, Meet OpenStack - How to Quickstart OpenStack and Connect Up Nimble Storage!

Hi Friends,

Ready for something completely different?!

Yep, you read that right, OpenStack.  I know what you're thinking, "But Brain, you're the Windows VDI guy who loves GUI's!  What are you doing working on an open source cloud tool that runs on Linux?!"

Well, believe it or not, once upon a time I used to be a Unix admin and I've been hearing lots of cool stuff about OpenStack and wanted to try it for myself and see what all the excitement was about.

So bear with me here, I'm a COMPLETE novice!  Huge thanks to Jay for getting me started!! :-)

I thought I'd walk you through a quick start-up and how I connected Nimble Storage to my OpenStack environment.

1.  Go grab yourself a copy of Centos 7 and install it.  I'm using my VMware environment to host my OpenStack test environment since I'm limited on physical hardware.

2.  I'm using the RDO implementation for my test OpenStack environment.  What is RDO?  From the RDO page, "RDO is two things. It's a freely-available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Fedora, and their derivatives. In addition to providing a set of software packages, it's also a community of users of cloud computing platform on Red Hat Linux operating systems to get help and compare notes on running OpenStack."

From the RDO page, "For a commercially-supported enterprise ready OpenStack solution, Red Hat provides Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, an enterprise-class cloud platform based on OpenStack Juno."

3.   Head over to the Quickstart page on the RDO site.  It's got all the per-requisites and how to get your instance running.  I'm going to put the steps in the blog because I'm going to forget how to do this if I don't!  All of the quickstart steps are taken from the RDO site.

4. We need to stop and disable NetworkManager

systemctl stop NetworkManager
systemctl disable NetworkManager
systemctl enable network

5. Make sure your networking is all good. Take a look at the steps on the Quickstart page for more information.

6. Update your current packages on your Linux distribution.

sudo yum update -y

7. Setup the RDO repositories.

sudo yum install -y https://rdoproject.org/repos/rdo-release.rpm

8. Now let's install the Packstack Installer.

sudo yum install -y openstack-packstack

9. Next we'll run Packstack to install OpenStack.  This step will take a bit of time, so be patient.  And if you're not patient, ummm, go do something else.

packstack --allinone

Alright, you've installed OpenStack!  You can now log into the OpenStack GUI!

10.  http://x.x.x.x/dashboard

Hmmm, username and password....

Oh! Hey, it's on the quickstart page!  Username is "admin" and password can be found in the file keystonerc_admin in the /root/ directory of the control node.

Okay, now that we have OpenStack installed, we need to let OpenStack know about our Nimble array.

11.  Head over to Nimble Storage InfoSight and from the Integration Kits tab select Nimble Cinder Volume Driver for OpenStack.  The cool thing is we don't need the driver, that's included in the OpenStack build now, but we do need to open up the User Guide and add some stuff to the cinder.conf file.

12. Open up the document and search for /etc/cider/cinder.conf.  It's in there a few times, so make sure you're at the part of the document that talks about configuring the Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash Cinder Driver.

13. Within the [DEFAULT] section of your /etc/cinder/cinder.conf file we need to add the nimble information.  You might see lvm already there, so just put in a comma and add Nimble-Cinder.

14.  Go to the end of the cinder.conf file and add the [Nimble-Cinder] information.  This will be the IP, username and password of your Nimble Storage array that you want to connect up to OpenStack.

15.  Okay now we need to create the Nimble Storage backend type.  You can call it whatever you like, I chose Nimble-Cinder.
cinder type-create Nimble-Cinder

I got a weird error when I tried to run the command, so I needed to go to my /root directory and type 
source keystonerc_admin

I'm not sure if you'll run into the same thing, but if you do, that's how I was able to continue.

16.  Next associate the type label with the Nimble-Cinder driver.
cinder type-key Nimble-Cinder set volume_backend_name=Nimble-Cinder

17.  Now we need to restart OpenStack.
service openstack-cinder-scheduler restart
service openstack-cinder-api restart
service openstack-cinder-volume restart

18.  Head over to your OpenStack GUI and we're ready to add some Nimble Storage!!

19.  Once there click on Volumes.

20.  Now click on +Create Volume.

21.  Name the Volume, select Nimble-Cinder as the Type, select the size of the volume and then click Create Volume.

22.  When the volume has been created it will appear in the Volumes page in the OpenStack GUI.

23.  Let's head over to the Nimble Storage array and see if the volume is showing up there.

Alright!  There's our 100GB OpenStack1 volume!

Next time I'll show you some more coolness of OpenStack, as I learn it!  :-)

-Brain