Cisco warns VMware vCenter bug puts hyperconverged tin in ‘unrecoverable’ state

Cisco has issued an odd warning to users of its HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure products, telling them a VMware programming blunder can leave their installation in an “unrecoverable” state. “A VMware software defect has been identified in vCenter Server 7.0 U1 that impacts HyperFlex clusters,” Cisco told customers. “ …

[Pascal Monett]

Well Cisco is certainly being proactive about it

If, however, they're only sending emails to existing customers, then there are a number of potential new customers that might get caught.

Except, of course, for the fact that the bug is rather hard to encounter since the buggy software is not compatible with Hyperflex in the first place, so I'd guess it's a bit difficult to encounter it.

Feels a bit like a case of headless chicken.

We need a chicken icon.

[Simon 49]

I agree that people should have more sense - but 7.0 has been out nearly 7 months and U1 is generally the place where enterprises start upgrading. Why has Cisco not got it qualified and addressed these issues yet?

I'm sure VMware will fix, but pre-April release was the time for Cisco to test this and raise the bugzilla ticket to have it fixed.

Even the stragglers of the storage and security vendors finally released 7.0 support in the last couple of months (probably initially timed to coincide with VMworld)

[DougMac]

Exactly. Cisco seems to be a year behind on supporting anything VMware, meanwhile VMware seems bent on having a 6-month release cycle with EOL'ing old releases as soon as 2 years old.

Leaving Cisco to support the trailing edge just before things fall out of support.

[Simon 49]

Yes. I HATE the way HW vendors are using the HCL to force refreshes on customers - by refusing to certify anything greater than 18 months old. Sucks for homelabs too - trial and error and forum digging is required moreso than it should be.

[YetAnotherJoeBlow]

As I said the other day, these new "upgrades" are downgrades cloaked in upgrade clothes.

[Henry Wertz 1]

"Except, of course, for the fact that the bug is rather hard to encounter since the buggy software is not compatible with Hyperflex in the first place, so I'd guess it's a bit difficult to encounter it."

They didn't say it's not compatible, they said it's not supported. (Of course, in this case it's REALLY not compatible.) It's very common for these enterprise products to support 1-2 versions of some dependency; just like normal software, sometimes it's very picky and really does need that version, usually they just don't want the support burden (for example, for both Java and Node.js, software will probably support Java 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, but they'd probably support a version or two even though it works with the rest.)

[YetAnotherJoeBlow]

Status

Has anyone been bitten by this?