VMware

The VMware VMUG UserCon has been my favourite local (Australian) event since attending my first one in 2017. It is one of the standout events for community sessions and networking and one I personally look forward to every year. The teams involved with VMUG and especially the local VMUG members in Sydney and Melbourne do a fantastic job every year of bringing everyone together and handling the logistics. Things will of course be different this year with the event going virtual, but I’m still looking forward to it on Thursday the 30th of July, 2020.

This one is just a quick post regarding an issue I came up against just before Christmas. To get straight to the point, I found an issue where in multiple separate environments, when cloning a virtual machine via the VMware vCenter HTML5 Web client interface, if you select the tick box to “customize this virtual machine’s hardware” and change any of the settings of the VM, the cloned virtual machine’s VMDK file(s) will be pointed to the VMDK file(s) of the source machine you used for the clone.

I was recently involved in an issue in an evnironment that started out looking like a simple SSL certificate replacement and ended with multiple hours of troubleshooting with GSS and redeployment of vSphere Replication. Fun times, right?! Let’s take a step back. This customer has a straight forward environment. Two physical sites, one vCenter Server and external PSC per site (6.5) in the same single sign on domain. Each site had one vSphere replication appliance and one Site Recovery Manager Server, version 8.

We had a customer recently that upgraded from vSphere 6.5 to 6.7 and following the upgrade to 6.7, virtual machines were sporadically being reset by vSphere HA with the following message in the vCenter event log: Error message on <VM Name> on <Host Name> in <Cluster>: VMware ESX unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0) vmk: vcpu-0:Unable to decompress BPN(0x100018003) from frameIndex(0x3d4aa2) block 1 for VM(2103599) We got this logged with GSS quickly and after being sent on a bit of a goose chase with firmware and driver upgrades (the versions we were running we compatible, but not latest), GSS noted that 5 other cases has been logged over the past couple of days with this same issue.

This approached very quickly, and next week one of the hottest VMware events in ANZ will be held in Sydney and Melbourne - the VMUG UserCon events! VMUG UserCons are a free one day event held once a year featuring a small vendor expo area, lots of educational sessions throughout the day, excellent opening and closing keynotes and of course the opportunity to mingle with industry peers, catch up with old friends and make a few new friends.

It’s that time of the year again where we have a new NSX release on our hands, specifically NSX-T 2.4. I’m still really new to NSX-T, and I can tell I have a lot to learn, but I’m hoping 2.4 is the release I’m able to really start to sink my teeth in with. If you’ve been in and around the NSX product, you’ll be aware there are two main flavours of NSX; NSX-V (now called NSX for vSphere, I think, or maybe NSX for Data Center(?

Overview A few weeks ago VMware released vSphere 6.7U1, and in that release comes a tool that has been desired by many customers and partners, which is the vCenter Converge Tool, or in other words, a tool to convert an external vCenter and PSC architecture in to an embedded deployment. In the last few releases of vCenter Server, VMware have supported replication of the PSC functionality between embedded deployment models, including Enhanced Linked Mode (named Embedded Linked Mode for an embedded deployment).

Next week the “ANZ” vForum event will be held once again in Sydney, Australia. The conference is returning to Sydney’s Luna Park where is was held 4 years ago in 2014 (from memory to celebrate a 10 year milestone of sorts), and that event was also my first vForum. vForum is also returning as a two day event after the format was changed last year to a one day event. I’m honestly not sure what the feedback was around it being a one day event, but VMware adjusting it back to two days speaks for itself.

Last night I was working in an environment that has a reasonably well locked down NSX distributed firewall, and I was having some issues with PowerCLI. PowerCLI 10.2 on Windows, connecting to vCenter Server 6.7, to be specific. Port 443 was allowed from the jump host to vCenter Server, but I was seeing some odd issues still. I was trying to run an as built report for the environment, but I could not seem to establish a connection to NSX manager when running the script, and VUM cmdlets that are called in the script were also failing, such as:

Well, that rolled around quickly. I remember booking the flights, accommodation and registration for VMware’s flagship VMworld event months ago and I’m now writing this from the plane about half way through the 27 hour journey from my home in Tasmania, Australia, to Las Vegas. This isn’t going to be a post on my recommendations, tips and tricks, or “how to attend if you aren’t attending”. There are lots of resources out there for this content and I urge you to go and read some of the blogs by others as there are some really great pointers!