VMware blog announced a security advisory today.
The advisory documents a hard to exploit denial of service vulnerability in the implementation of the OSPF protocol in NSX-V Edge (CVE-2017-4920). This issue is present due to incorrect handling of link-state advertisements (LSA). NSX-V Edge 6.2.8 and NSX-V Edge 6.3.3 address the issue.
More Info VMSA-2017-0014
VMworld 2017 is close and the vExpert team made sure they kept us happy.
Today I got my vExpert NSX VMworld Swag! A big box of goodies that helps vExperts stand out in the crowd.
Have a look
Inside there is a Jacket, a T-shirt and a water bottle – all branded vExpert NSX 2017!
Sweet – Thanks NSX vExpert Team!
IT/Digital transformation is the wave upon which all the major enterprises are hitching a ride. It promises not just innovation but faster product to market, cost reductions and over all revenue increases across the business.
This VMworld 2017, the theme is undoubtedly focused not just on technology, but on business outcomes through IT/Digital Transformation. It is important to remember that what you are doing or working on does not matter if it fails to achieve effective long term business outcomes. This is what every business executive is driven towards – to achieve these business outcomes with maximum efficiency and minimal costs.
As technologies evolved, business were quick to extract more value out of their physical assets without increasing costs (and assets) exponentially. This has undoubtedly increased the consumption and management of these ever growing and highly sought after resources.
Companies today lack the resources, the understanding and the necessary customization that are required to build these transformational processes that drive the efficiency engine behind IT/digital transformation. Applying older processes to a advanced technology is equivalent to having an advanced engine in a 1940’s sedan. The engine will work well but the sedan will simply fall apart.
We will continue this discussion and talk about identifying different aspects of IT transformation and gradually take the conversation to OT (Operational) transformation. Stay tuned.
On Jan 26, VMware silently announced the release of vCloud Availability 1.0.1 which allows you to build disaster recovery solutions in vCloud Director. The idea here is replication of VMs to a multi-tenant cloud. The best thing about this replication technology is that you don’t need a special replication network and replication traffic can safely travel over the internet. Another thing to note is that replication in either way is always initiated from the on-prem site only.
After VMware cloud showed up, there was a dire need for having cloud as replication traffic target and VMware is aiming to solve it by vCloud Availability 1.0.1. The service is said to scale to hundreds of customers which means any hosting provider can now be a DR target to a plethora of customers.
You can read more details on how it works – here
The official VMware blog about it is – here.
vRA is very sensitive. All the users, all the permissions and all the DEM workers have to be all set and happy or else you will start missing tabs in vRA which causes you to break your head.
I started missing the Reservations tab and it was frustrating! Yes it was.
There was this decent KB that made me realize how important it is to add users and connect to their appropriate permissions in vRA.
Just a quick read and a refresher on vSAN Design Decision to keep my memory fresh..
Sizing for capacity, maintenance and availability
1. The minimum configuration required for Virtual SAN is 3 ESXi hosts, or two hosts in conjunction with an external witness node. However, this smallest environment has important restrictions.
2. In Virtual SAN, if there is a failure, an attempt is made to rebuild any virtual machine components from the failed device or host on the remaining cluster. In a 3-node cluster, if one node fails, there is nowhere to rebuild the failed components. The same principle holds for a host that is placed in maintenance mode.
3. One of the maintenance mode options is to evacuate all the data from the host. However, this will only be possible if there are 4 or more nodes in the cluster, and the cluster has enough spare capacity.
4. One additional consideration is the size of the capacity layer. Since virtual machines deployed on Virtual SAN are policy driven, and one of those policy settings (NumberOfFailuresToTolerate) will make a mirror copy of the virtual machine data, one needs to consider how much capacity is required to tolerate one or more failures.
Design decision: 4 nodes or more provide more availability options than 3 node configurations. Ensure there is enough storage capacity to meet the availability requirements and to allow for a rebuild of the components after a failure.
Brew or Homebrew kept erroring out on MacOS with El Capitan – turns out it had to do with security feature called SIP = Security integrity protection which prevents changes to the /System, /Usr and /sbin directory.
You can disable it by running – “csrutil disable” command.
For homebrew to work
$ sudo chown -R $(whoami):admin /usr/local If it still doesn’t work, use following steps
1. open terminal
2. $ cd /usr/local
3. $ git reset --hard
4. $ git clean -df
5. $ brew update
Credit Hello all,
Deployed vRB 7.0.1 cloud and turns out there is a known issue where once you deploy vRealize business cloud in your environment – it immediately causes all your blueprints to fail.
This is a known issue and some work arounds were discussed across the communities. One such work around being,
After vRealize Business for Cloud 7.0.1 upgrade, you cannot provision vRealize Automation with a blueprint
After upgrade, attempt to provision vRealize Automation by using a blueprint fails with an error message.
Request failed while fetching item metadata: Error communicating with Pricing service.
Workaround: Perform the following steps:
Hope that helps,
I was building my lab with VSAN backed storage – because I did not have a compatible RAID card I grouped the disks as a RAID-0 and presented it to VSAN. It worked and worked well – VSAN saw one big disk of about 1.6 TB (Had three disks worth 550GB each).
I was advised that it was a bad idea – because if the data got striped by the RAID controller and if one disk goes bad – VSAN now is stuck with missing and corrupted disk.
The proper way to do this was to have a RAID-0 on per disk and present all these individual disk volumes to VSAN to participate in a disk group. I went back and did that and boy am I glad that I did.
Today this happened
The fix was easy – Just highlight the disk and click on actions to remove the disk from the disk group. Depending on the failure you might be able to recover the data 
Thanks to Luke Huckaba – @thephuck for pointing it out in my lab which saved me hours of work later.
Now time to setup SPBM to avoid multiple failures 😀
Was trying to deploy a nested ESXi on VSAN backed storage and kept running into this error during install.
This program has encountered an error:
Error (see log for more info):
Could not format a vmfs volume.
Command ‘/usr/sbin/vmkfstools -C vmfs5 -b 1m -S datastore1
/vmfs/devices/disks/mpx.vmhba1:C0:T0:L0:3′ exited with status 1048320
Turns out the problem is with a SCSI-2 reservation being generated as part of creating a default VMFS datastore. You can read more here.
The fix was this simple hack. = run this in each of your hosts and no system reboot is required.
esxcli system settings advanced set -o /VSAN/FakeSCSIReservations -i 1
Enjoy!
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