Getting Shutdown/Reboot to Work in KVM/QEMU

I was having trouble getting shutdown/reboot in virt-manager to work with KVM/QEMU. I had to do a Force Off, which is basically like pulling the plug. It's actually pretty easy to fix.

Setting Up a Bridged Network Interface for KVM in Ubuntu

The process for setting up a network bridge for KVM in Ubuntu is actually fairly simple. For the purposes of this demo, we will assume that you already have KVM/QEMU installed from the Ubuntu Repos and that you are not using Network Manager. If you are using Network Manager, you must disable it prior to following these instructions. I am using  Ubuntu Server 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot), but this should work for 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) and 11.04 (Natty Narwhal).

check_esx3 error "Permission to perform this operation was denied"

Today I was setting up VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi 5.0) on a new server. Since I'm on the Kool-aid, the first thing I do when setting up a server is getting some kind of Nagios monitoring going. For several years, on ESXi servers, I have been using op5's check_esx3 plugin. Today was the first time I had set up an ESXi 5.0 server though, and when I first ran it after creating my Nagios user in ESXi I got the following error:

Permission to perform this operation was denied