Sorry for the long delay since my last blog post - busy times, but with lots of vSphere. :) Today, I did an upgrade of a standalone vCenter Server Appliance at one of my healthcare customers. The vCenter was on 6.0 U3 and I had to upgrade it to 6.7 U2. It was only a small deployment with three hosts, so nothing fancy. And as with in many other vSphere upgrades, I came across this warning message:
THIS IS FIXED in ESXi 6.5 U3 and 6.7 U3.
See KB67426 (Performance issues with Windows 10 version 1809 VMs running on snapshots) for more information.
TL;DR: This bug is still up to date and has not been fixed yet! Some user in the VMTN thread mentioned a hotpatch from VMware, which seems to be pulled. A fix for this issue will be available with ESXi 6.5 U3 and 6.7 U3. The only workaround is to place VMs on VMFS 5 datastores, or avoid the use of snapshots if you have to use VMFS 6. I can confirm, that Windows 1903 is also affected.
Yesterday, I got one of these mails from a customer that make you think “Ehm, no”.
Can you please enable the TPM on all VMs.
The customer
The short answer is “Ehm, no!”. But I’m a kind guy, so I added some explanation to my answer.
Let’s add some context around this topic. The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a cryptoprocessor that offers various functions. For example, BitLocker uses the TPM to protect encryption keys. But there are another pretty interesting Windows features that require a TPM: “Virtualization-based Security”, or VBS. In contrast to BitLocker, VBS might be a feature that you want to use inside a VM.
Vembu was founded in 2002 and has over 60,000 customers worldwide. One of their core products is the Vembu BDR Suite, which is an one stop solution to all your Backup and DR needs. I wrote a longer blog post about the Vembu BDR Suite.
One part of this suite is Vembu VMBackup, which is a data protection solution that is designed to backup VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines secure and simple way. The offered features are compareable to Veeam Backup & Replication.
I was onsite at one of my customers to update a small VMware vSphere 6.0 U3 environment to 6.5 U2c. The environment consists of three hosts. Two hosts in a cluster, and a third host is only used to run a HPE StoreVirtual Failover Manager.
The update of the first host, using the Update Manager and a HPE custom ESX 6.5 image, was pretty flawless. But the update of the second host failed with “Cannot execute upgrade script on host”
While building a small Citrix NetScaler… ehm… ADC VPX (I really hate this name…) lab environment, I noticed that the fan of my Lenovo T480s was spinning up. I was wondering why, because the VPX VM was just running for a couple of minutes - without any load. But the task manager told me, that the VMware Workstation Process was consuming 25% (I have a Intel i5 Quad Core CPU) CPU. So VMware Workstation was just eating a whole CPU core without doing anything. I would not care, but the fan… And it reminded me, that I’ve seen an similar behaviour in various VPX deployments on VMWare ESXi.
I hope that you are not reading this blog post while searching for a solution for a failed cluster. If so, feel free to leave a comment if this blog post saved your evening or weekend. :)
Last friday, a change at one of my customers went horribly wrong. I was not onsite, but they contacted me during the night from friday to saturday, because their most important Windows Server Failover Cluster was unable to start after extending a shared VMDK.
It is common that vendors offer their products in special editions for SMB customers. VMware offers VMware vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus, Veeam offers Veeam Backup Essentials, and now Vembu has published Vembu BDR Essentials.
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR Essentials/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
Backup is important. There is no reason to have no backup. According to an infographic published by Clutch Research at the World Backup Day 2017, 60% of all SMBs that lost all their data will shutdown within 6 months after the data loss. Pretty bad, isn’t it?
TL;DR: I have passed the VCAP6-DCV Deploy exam today. :) I want to thank Fred, Dominik, Frank and Jens-Henrik for kicking my ass. Without you, I would have taken the VCP 6.5 delta exam. Thank you!
As often, the whole thing started with a tweet. A tweet about my expiring VMware Certified Professional (VCP) certification.
To my surprise, several of my followers recommended to go for the VCAP6-DCV Deployment instead. Okay, so many smart people can’t be wrong.
When taking a backup with Veeam Backup & Replication, a VM snapshot is created to get a consistent state of the VM. The snapshot is taken prior the backup, and it is removed after the successful backup of the VM. The snapshot grows during its lifetime, and you should keep in mind, that you need some free space in the datastore for snapshots. This can be a problem, especially in case of multiple VM backups at a time, and if the VMs share the same datastore.
