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Search Results for: vsphere events

Logging into vCenter when vCenter Cloud Gateway (VCGW) is disconnected from vSphere+ Cloud Service

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As part of setting up access to the vSphere+ / vSAN+ Cloud Service, a vCenter Cloud Gateway (VCGW) is deployed into your on-premises infrastructure and serves as a gateway between your vCenter Server(s) and the VMware Cloud Console.

If the VCGW has connectivity issues to the VMware Cloud Console for whatever reason, your infrastructure and workloads continue to run but you will not be able to perform any operations through the VMware Cloud Console until connectivity is restored.

UPDATE (06/21/23) - The period in which VMware declares a VCGW unreachable has been updated from 24hrs to 7 days. This means even if your VCGW loses connectivity, you will still be able to login to your on-premises vCenter Server and/or SDDC Manager without needing to go to emergency URL.

However, if you attempt to login into your on-premises vCenter Server(s) using the vSphere UI, you may be surprised to find the following error message.


The message may looking alarming at first about not being able to login, but can still login even if connectivity between the VCGW and VMware Cloud Console has been lost.

While I will agree the user experience may not very intuitive, the hint is in the URL link below where it says "Still having connection problems?"

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Power off VM from Guest OS Reboot capability in vSphere 8

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In 2019, a new VM advanced setting called vmx.reboot.PowerCycle was introduced and greatly simplified the remediation of CPU vulnerabilities for our customers. The operational challenge that came with applying CPU microcode updates was that all running VMs on an ESXi host would need to go through a complete power cycle (power off and power back on) before the guest operating system(s) would be fully protected.

The new VM setting would notify ESXi to convert a guest operating system reboot into a VM power cycle operation, which aligns nicely when an organization applies a guest OS update or patch and the guest OS is then rebooted afterwards. The benefit to our customers is that the remediation of CPU vulnerabilities can co-exists with an organizations existing maintenance window and the OS is remediated through a regular guest OS reboot. From the guest OS point of view, nothing has changed, it still sees a reboot but from the VM virtual hardware point of view, a complete power cycle has occurred. A very cool and innovative solution if you ask me!?

The reason for this background, there is another use case that has also been operationally challenging which is upgrading the VM Compatibility, also known as VM Virtual Hardware. A VM must be powered off before you can change the VM Compatibility and a simliar challenge arises with coordinating the downtime of a VM with application owners/teams. What if we had a simliar capability like the guest OS reboot triggering a power cycle, but instead of power cycling the VM, it would simply power it off?

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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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