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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. ...

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). It has been clear that the embedded model should now be the default model and it is the recommended model from VMware, in fact last week VMware announced their plans to deprecate the external PSC, but until today we did not have a way to automatically converge an external model in to an embedded model. ...

Disclaimer: Vembu are a sponsor of Virtual Tassie and this post is a sponsored blog post. This post has been written in my own words but may contain some material supplied by Vembu for an upcoming release or announcement. Vembu have been hard at work behind the scenes on a new version of their BDR suite and version 4.0 is due for release soon. As a quick recap, the BDR Suite is a range of products available from Vembu to help businesses with data protection and disaster recovery of their workloads. There are several products available under the suite, all of which are managed from a central management portal. ...

Update 27th October 2018: I was meant to provide this update last weekend, but it has been a hectic week. Within a few hours of posting this issue, a few people at VMware reached out to me to understand more about my configuration, asked me to upload the logs and a few of the smart guys and gals at VMware had been able to reproduce the issue. As it turns out, the key in the APPLMGMT_PASSWORD vecs store is used when a file based backup of the VCSA is scheduled. I believe a KB is on the way, but the workaround is to delete the VCSA backup schedule, perform the converge and you can then re-enable the schedule after the converge is complete. ...

Runecast were the last company I had the pleasure of being a delegate for at the Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2018. I’ve written about Runecast on this blog before, and I really like who they are and what they do. Runecast is a proactive VMware management solution, delivered as a pre-packaged appliance, that aims to provide you with issue prevention, security compliance and log analytics for your VMware environment before any major outages occur. ...