Bug

As any other environment, my lab needs some maintenance from time to time. I use a Windows 2012 R2 VM with the Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) role to keep my Windows VMs up to date. Like many others, I was surprised by KB3148812 (Update enables ESD decryption provision in WSUS in Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2), which broke my WSUS. But the fix was easy: Uninstall KB3148812 and reboot the server. The WSUS product team published an artice about this known issue in their blog: Known Issues with KB3148812. In the meantime, Microsoft has published a new update, which supersedes KB3148812: KB3159706.

While upgrading a rather old (but very stable) Veeam Backup & Replication 6.1 installation to 8.0 Update 3 (with intermediate step to 6.5), I ran into a curious error. Right after the welcome screen, this error message

appeared. A closer look into the BackupSetup.log (you can find this log in the %temp% dir. Just enter %temp% into the Explorer address bar) resulted in this very interesting log entry:

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.

This is not a brand new issue and it’s well discussed in the VMTN. After applying the ESXi 5.5.0 U2 patches from 15. October 2014, you may notice the following symptoms:

• Some Citrix NetScaler VMs with e1000 vNICs loses network connectivity
• You can’t access the VM console after applying the patches

VMware has released a couple of patches in October:

• ESXi550-201410101-SG (esx-base)
• ESXi550-201410401-BG (esx-base)
• ESXi550-201410402-BG (misc-drivers)
• ESXi550-201410403-BG (sata-ahci)
• ESXi550-201410404-BG (xhci-xhci)
• ESXi550-201410405-BG (tools-light)
• ESXi550-201410406-BG (net-vmxnet3)

More specifically, it’s the patch ESXi550-201410401-BG that is causing the problem. It is reported that the patch ESXi510-201410401-BG is also cause problems. VMware has published a KB article under the the KB2092809. Citrix has also published a KB article under the ID CTX200278. The VMware KB2092809 includes a workaround. You have to add the line

Today I observed a strange behaviour of several VMs at a customer. Several VMs in a cluster showed an alarm, but neither on the alarm tab of the VM, nor the alarm section at the bottom of the C# client showed an error.

The customer still uses vSphere 5.0. An upgrade to 5.5 is on the roadmap. The symptoms: