Since monday I’m helping a customer to put two HP 3PAR StoreServ 7200c into operation. Both StoreServs came factory-installed with 3PAR OS 3.2.1 MU3, which is available since July 2015. Usually, the first thing you do is to deploy the 3PAR Service Processor (SP). These days this is (in most cases) a Virtual Service Processor (VSP). The SP is used to initialize the storage system. Later, the SP reports to HP and it’s used for maintenance tasks like shutdown the StoreServ, install updates and patches.

This issue is described in KB2971270 and is fixed in CU6. I ran a couple of times in this error. After applying changes to SSL certificates (add, replace or delete a SSL certificate) and rebooting the server, the event log is flooded with events from source “HttpEvent” and event id 15021. The message says: An error occurred while using SSL configuration for endpoint 0.0.0.0:444. The error status code is contained within the returned data.

Last sunday a customer suffered a power outage for a few hours. Unfortunately the DataCore Storage Server in the affected datacenter weren’t shutdown and therefore it crashed. After the power was back, the Storage Server was started and the recoveries for the mirrored virtual disks started. Hours later, three mirrored virtual disks were still running full recoveries and the recovery for each of them failed repeatedly. Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0

Last week I got a call from a customer. The customer has tried to deploy new Citrix XenApp servers, and because the VMware template was a bit outdated, he tried to clone a provisioned and running Citrix XenApp VM. During this, the customer applied a guest customization specification to customize the guest OS (IP address, hostname etc). Until this point everything was fine. But after the clone process, the guest customization started, but never finished.

PernixData is one of the presenting sponsors at the Virtualization Field Day 5 (VFD5). One of the four key announcements is FVP Freedom. FVP Freedom will be available in the Fall of 2015 and it’s a completely free version of PernixData FVP. Of course, the functionality is limited. FVP Freedom will only support a single cluster, but with an unlimited number of VMs. Instead of SSDs, FVP Freedom will support up to 128 GB of DFTM (Distributed Fault Tolerant Memory) per cluster.

This tweet from @JuniperCertify has caught my attention: It's official...the Design track released today! Details: http://t.co/8Oz4ayOkMI Insights from a JNCDA developer: http://t.co/k8nTXGdwk1 — Juniper Networks Certification Program (@JuniperCertify) May 27, 2015 Later that day, I got an e-mail from Juniper with the same announcement. Juniper has launched its Design Certification Track inside the Juniper Networks Certification Program (JNCP) and the Juniper Networks Certified Design Associate (JNCDA) is the first available certification.

While I was playing with my shiny, new HP StoreOnce VSA in my lab, I noticed a curious behavior. I created a NAS share for some tests with Veeam Backup & Replication. Creating a new share is nothing fancy. You can create a share in two ways: using the GUI, or using the CLI So I created a new share: Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0 Nothing special, as you can see.

Today, I took my very first VMware beta exam. I took the 2V0-621D exam, known as the VMware Certified Professional 6 – Data Center Virtualization Delta Beta Exam, at a local Pearson VUE test center. This exam is a possible migration paths from a valid VCP5-DCV, or any valid solution track VCP, to the VCP6-DCV certification. The benefit of a beta exam is the low price (currently 50 US-$) and a chance to upgrade the associated certification, in this case the VCP6-DCV.

Some weeks ago, HP has published an updated version of their HP Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP). The SPP 2015.04.0 has added support for new HP ProLiant servers and options, support for Red Had Enterprise Linux 6.6, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, VMware vSphere 5.5 U2 and (of course) VMware vSphere 6.0, HP Smart Update Manager v7.2.0 was added, the HP USB Key Utility for Windows v2.0.0.0 can now handle downloads greater than 4GB (important, because this release may not fit on a standard DVD media…) select Linux firmware components is now available in rpm format In addition, the SPP covers two important customer advisories:

Today, VMware has published the long-awaited patch for the ESXi 6.0 CBT bug. This patch is the result of a problem, which is described in KB2114076 (Backing up a virtual machine with Change Block Tracking (CBT) enabled fails after upgrading to or installing VMware ESXi 6.0). All customers that upgraded to ESXi 6.0 or installed ESXi 6.0 were affected. Symptoms of this bug were: Powering on virtual machines fails Expanding the size of a virtual disk fails Taking virtual machine quiesced snapshots fails Error messages like “An error occurred while taking a snapshot: msg.