Virtualization

One of my customers is running a five node Nutanix cluster, which is configured for FT2 (2N/2D). This means, that if the storage containers are configured with RF3, two of the five nodes can fail. Now I stumbled over the “Cluster Resiliency / Fault Tolerance Status” widget on the dashboard, which clearly showed that only a single node failure would be tolerated. This was a bit confusing, because the cluster is configured for FT2, which should allow two node failures (in case of RF3 for the storage containers).

This error gets me from time to time, regardless which server vendor, mostly on hosts that were upgraded a couple of times. In this case it was a ESXi host currently running a pretty old build of ESXi 6.7 U3 and my job was the upgrade to 7.0 Update 3c.

If you add a upgrade baseline to the cluster or host, and you try to remediate the host, the task fails with a dependency error. When taking a closer look into the taks details, you were getting told that the task has failed because of a failed dependency, but not which VIB it caused.

EDIT: It seems that his was fixed in vCenter 7.0 U3.

While debugging a vCener Lifecycle Manager, which was unable to download updates, I’ve stumbled over a weird behaviour, which is (IMHO) by design.

Some of you might use a proxy server. And some of you might use a proxy server which requires credentials. In my case, my customer uses a Sophos SG appliance as a web proxy server with authentication. The customer creaded a user with a complex password. But I was unable to get a working internet connection.

Adding a second factor to your authentication is always a good idea. Typically the second factor is a One-Time Password (OTP) or a push notification. But what if you want to allow the login into your Horizon View environment only from specific devices? This implies that you need some kind of second factore that also identifies the device. At this point the arch enemy of many of us comes into play: Certificates!