July

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.

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.

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.

I’ve just been working through automating the powering on and off of my lab server, which is a single physical server running ESXi 6.5, and nested virtual machines for my lab. I wanted to use the ESXi Autostart feature to start my domain controller and jump box at power on. But I had an issue where one of the two VMs I want to power on would simply not start.