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Heads Up - Potential missing vCenter Server Events due to sequence ID overflow

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We had a few users who had reported issues with using the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution where VEBA was not receiving any events from the connected vCenter Server. This was really puzzling for the team to debug because the user clearly saw events in both the vSphere UI as well as using vSphere Automation Clients like PowerCLI.

After a bit of debugging with a few of our users (huge thanks to Michael Gasch for driving this), we discovered that in certain environments, the generated sequence number that is used for the vCenter Event ID has overflowed and causes the value to have a negative number. To further complicate the debugging, there are actually two ways of fetching vCenter Server Events using the vSphere API. The first is to just look at the LatestPage property, which will return the most recent events and not care about event ID and the second is to use CreateCollectorForEvents() which is more of an event stream and it does care about the event ID being non-negative. You can probably guess which vSphere API VEBA was using, not only because of our check-pointing feature but LatestPage could lose events from a client request point of view for chatty environments.

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Quick Tip - Avoid network conflicts with Docker Bridge Network on the vCenter Cloud Gateway for vSphere+/vSAN+

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The new vSphere+/vSAN+ cloud service is now generally available for all customers! For those interested, I recently wrote about my first experience using the new vSphere+vSAN+ service with my vSphere Homelab environment, which I will also be updating based on the generally available service.

In addition to the resources above and in the VMC Cloud Console, here is a link to the official vSphere+/vSAN+ documentation including pre-req.

During my initial deployment of the vCenter Cloud Gateway (VCGW) used by the vSphere+/vSAN+ service, I did not run into any issues but upon deploying my second VCGW for a different environment, I ran into some networking issues. After a bit of debugging, I came to learn  that the VCGW application and services are composed of various Docker containers and there was a network conflict with the default Docker Bridge Network that the VCGW has been configured by default with.

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Emulating a Virtual USB storage device using Nested ESXi

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My buddy Alan Renouf had pinged me earlier today and asked whether it was possible to emulate a USB storage device that could aide him in the testing the installation of ESXi from a USB device but without having to use a real USB device. I honestly was not aware of any mechanisms that would allow for this and I normally would just passthrough a real USB device to a Nested ESXi VM for this type of testing purposes.

While thinking about his question, I also recall we had made some enhancements to our Virtual USB interface that would allow user to back it using a disk file. While searching further, I came to learn that not only was this possible, but it was also a common method for testing USB-based installation without the hassle of messing with physical hardware. It turns out you can just present a Virtual Disk (VMDK) to a VM running ESXi (Nested ESXi) and through a special driver, it will recognize the device as a USB storage device!

I definitely wish I had learned about this earlier and it goes to show, all the hard engineering efforts made by our VMware Engineers to make testing and using our software as easy as possible even without needing real physical hardware 😀

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