VMWare Workstation – Module ‘CPUIDEarly’ power on failed

Successfully installed VMWare Workstation on my Dell T5400 workstation, but when I went to power on my VM to finish installing, got the following error:

Module ‘CPUIDEarly’ power on failed.

Solution:

I have a Dell T5400 Workstation, so restart the PC (if already on)

1.) Press the “F2” button when the Dell logo appears to load the BIOS.
On Hewlett Packard PCs its “F10” to load the bios.

2.) Once the BIOS has loaded, use the keyboard arrows to scroll down to Performance.

3.) Hit the Right arrow key to expand the performance drop down.

4.) The two values I am looking for are Virtualization and VT for Direct I/O which are both set as “Off”.

5.) Select both settings to On, and press ESC to load into Windows.

You will not be able to power on the Virtual Machine.

CommVault – Virtual Machine Disks Consolidation Error

In my Pre-Prod environment, noticed that CommVault was not performing VM Snapshots on a particular server.

Checked vCenter and saw that there was a message saying that the Virtual Machine disks required consolidation.

Right click on the VM and click Consolidate.
It would run for a while and then get an error saying;

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An error occurred while consolidating disks: msg.fileio.lock.

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Resolution:
vMotion the storage to another datastore to release the lock. Then vMotion back to the same datastore.

Was then able to do a Disk Consolidation without any issues.

Error while powering on – The Intel VMX Unrestricted Guest feature is necessary

Rebuilt one of my ESXi hosts into a windows server with VMWare Workstation  (future HomeLab update post coming).

First server that I started to build and powered on I got the following error:

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This host does not support virtualizing real mode. The Intel VMX Unrestricted Guest feature is necessary to run this virtual machine on an Intel processor.

Module CPUIDEarly power on failed.

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The reason this is the case if that in Workstation 14, the system requirements changed meaning that old CPUs like mine

Go to C:\ProgramData\VMWare\VMWare Workstation and add the following setting to the config.ini file:

monitor.allowLegacyCPU = “true”

Close VMWare Workstation and now you will be able to start the Virtual Machine.

The Big Three Conference Announcements – 2019

I thought I would list the Big 3 (Oracle, Microsoft and VMWare) announcements from their recent annual conferences to remind me to go and study these new features early next year.

First up – Oracle OpenWorld.
Held in San Francisco back in September.

• Oracle has gone further in the stack with its Autonomous Database (self servicing database engine) by announcing Autonomous Oracle Linux.
  Like the database it provisions itself, it scales itself, it tines itself, it patches itself while its running.
• Oracle is getting into the blockchain game. Kinda. They releasing a new kind of table called a blockchain table and when rows are inserted into a blockchain table it creates a cryptographic chain of the data, which clients can use to check for any kind of fraud.
• Oracle Cloud Applications Suite is getting some new features and updates, as well as rolling out Digital Assistants across the suite.
• New Oracle Exadata machine. 100Gbps network and direct access data stored in Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory. This makes I/O ten times faster than previous Exadata releases.
• Oracle will open another 20 “regions” for its cloud services by the end of 2020. 11 of these new regions will be duplicates of existing regionals, which will allow customers to setup DR systems with the same region.

Second up – VMWorld US .
Held in San Francisco in early September.

• Probably the announcement that I am most excited about is Project Pacific. In a nutshell, VMWare will embed Kubernetes into vSphere. This means that you can manage Kubernetes objects from the vSphere Client.
  More information from Kit Colbert here.
• VMWare Cloud is now available on Dell EMC.
  More information from Kit Colbert here.
• Dell EMC kit now comes with VMWare vSphere pre-installed and pre-activated with your license keys.

 

Lastly – Microsoft Ignite.
Held early November in Orlando, Florida.

• Azure Arc is the new control panel that organisations can leverage Azure to manage their resources across AWS and Google Cloud.
• Project Cortex is a knowledge network for your company. It uses Machine Learning to analyse all of your documents and contracts in various repositories and then surfaces them in Outlook, Teams and other Office Apps.

• SCCM and Intune Services are set to be combined and called Endpoint Manager going forward.
• Power Virtual Agents. The ‘no-code/low-code’ tool for building chatbots. It uses Azures machine learning.
• Azure Synapse Analytics. Big-data analytics with data warehousing.
• Web Based Visual Studio development environment is now live in preview.