2019

Introduction Towards the end of 2019, I made a decision to aim for a certification in one of the primary public clouds. The decision on which cloud to focus on was relatively simple for me for a couple of reasons: Microsoft certianly seem to be doing awesome things with Azure and it feels like there is a lot of hype around Azure in the circles I travel in, at least more so than GCP or AWS I work for a partner and while not specifically in the team that are delivering public cloud solutions and managed services, we are currently 100% focused on Azure and are a Microsoft triple gold partner. It makes sense for me to skill up in the public cloud that the company I work for is fully invested in I don’t want this to become a discussion around whether certifications are “worth it”, but specically on the second point above, when you work for a partner, almost all vendors still put requirements on partners to have ‘x’ amount of certified staff at different levels to achieve different partner statuses. The reality is, if you are a technical staff member working for a MSP / VAR, you should absolutely expect your employer will want to you become and remain certified with key partner vendors. ...

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 8.1.2.8325 Build 13095593 to be exact. ...

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. Out of the 6 environments, 4 had rolled back to 6.5 and our advice to the customer was to do the same, but they were OK with leaving it and letting GSS try to get to the root cause so it could be fixed. ...

I’ll be upfront and honest - backup and recovery doesn’t excite me, and it never has. On the other hand, this world of data management, policy driven protection / placement and analysis of said data does tweak my interest, which is why I taken an interest in tinkering with some of the modern platforms, for want of a better term, such as Cohesity. But as I was reading through the “what’s new” section of Cohesity DataPlatform 6.3, which I’ve got early access to (Thanks Pete Marfatia), I saw the following comment: ...

Introduction With the release of Cohesity version 6.2, there is support to protect Exchange Online Office365 mailboxes natively within the product. Protecting data in a SaaS platform is always an interesting discussion. At the end of the day, there is a shared responsibility model at play here, and as the customer and/or consumer, there are still some very valid reasons you’d want to ensure you are protecting business critical data such as exchange online mailboxes. The low hanging fruit that comes to mind as I write this post are things like malware, phishing and insider threats or attacks. Microsoft do provide some native built-in functionality for protecting data, but there are limitations with the offerings from Microsoft. ...

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. Sydney Usercon will be on March 19th, and Melbourne UserCon will follow on March 21st. ...

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(?)) and NSX-T. NSX-V was built around VMware vSphere and has a reliance on vCenter Server. NSX-T is the big brother with many more capabilities, has been build with understanding and support for modern technologies such as containers and multi-cloud, and does not have a reliance on any of the core VMware platform, but of course it does interoperate really well with core VMware technologies. It has been known for a while, but maybe not verbalised, that the effort and development from VMware is heavily focused on NSX-T. ...

Yeah - I know, I know. It’s February 2019 already and I’m only just wrapping up the 2018 calendar year! Better late than never, right? Similar to last year, the Christmas and New Year’s break (end of December) seems like a good time for everyone to take a step back and reflect on the year that has been, and I certainly did the same. I also believe it is important to have similar reflections throughout the year as well to keep a track of your goals and evaluate if your goals have changed, and adjust with those changes. ...