High CPU Utilization during LDAP Query

I had a customer recently who's Domain Controller was pegged at 100% CPU utilization from the process lsass.exe. We determined the problem was from their spam appliance constantly performing LDAP lookups.

After digging around a little bit I found the option to use Global Catalog lookups for the LDAP Query instead of Straight LDAP lookups. The big secret was to change the appliance from doing its lookups using port 389 to port 3268, of course this means you also need to make sure the Domain Controller you do the lookup against is a Global Catalog.

After doing thise CPU utilization went from 100% to 1%-2% with no repercusions found.

Here's a link describing the differences between port 389 and 3268 lookups


Lucas

Vmware Tools Upgrade Failures

Recently, a customer upgraded from ESX3.5 to vSphere, and subsequently, had a number of VMs whose VMTools automatic upgrade failed. The failure would leave the old version of VM Tools partially uninstalled, and unable to be removed via Add/Remove programs. The solution is to run regedit and manually delete the keys associated with the VMTools install. The following KB article from VMWare lists the keys that need to be removed.

VMWare KB Article

In my experience, the upgrade removed some of the keys listed in the article, so all of them may or may not be present.