If you’re running your vSphere deployment on HP kit then there’s a pretty good chance you use the HP Customized ISO Image for installation, for example this one for ESXi 4.1 U1. These customised images typically contain HP management tools and drivers and are great for saving time during the installation process. Naturally you will be upgrading ESXi at some point, but it’s important that you also keep the HP part up-to-date too.
The HP Enterprise Virtual Array Family with VMware vSphere 4.0 , 4.1 AND 5.0 Configuration Best Practises Guide, available here, contains many recommendations for ESXi configuration. There are a number of recommended settings in this document to enhance the storage performance, a subset of which I have picked as appropriate for the environment and then needed to configure them on all ESXi hosts.
They can be implemented via PowerCLI and the below script demonstrates how these different types of settings can be configured.
I recently had a task to query NIC information on a number of HP Proliant servers, this included the connected NIC speed, duplex settings and status of the configured HP Team. I initally looked at the WMI class Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration which contains a lot of info around NIC configuration. Unfortunately, it does not include NIC speed or duplex settings.
Looking for alternatives, I discovered a script from Hugo Peeters which instead queried the registry key HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} which looked like it would do the job.