Virtual Architect

Recently Update 1 for vSphere 4.0 came available. It seems there is a serious issue when upgrading from 4.0 to 4.0 Update 1 using Update Manager and where ESX-hosts make use of 3rd party Monitoring agents (in COS).

Upgrading to U1 using Update Manager with 3rd party management agents active may result in a failure by timing out and/or PSoD (Purple Screen of Death).  To recover from such a situation a fresh install of your host is necessary.

To avoid a fresh install disable the 3rd party management agents before upgrading and enable them afterwards.

Note that ESXi is not affected.

UPDATE (VMware Knowledge base blog):

A quick note: The problem with U1 is now known to be limited to HP Proliant systems and HP Insight Management agents are running. See the updated KB article.

Read more in VMware’s knowledgebase article KB 1016070

I noticed a small cosmetic thing while upgrading my homelab to vSphere Update1.

With the Update 1 release of vSphere, VMware also introduced her new logo into the applications area. Here’s a screenshot:

Before upgrade (vSphere 4.0):

After upgrade (vSphere 4.0 Update 1):

Another change with this update is the ability to run the client on Windows 7 out of the box without using workarounds!

Quest just released the Quest vWorkspace Mac AppPortal.

Michel Roth twittered/blogged on the Quest Blog:

Just a quick note that we recently released our Quest vWorkspace Mac AppPortal. This is a full vWorkspace AppPortal client meaning that you can run it using Quest vWorkspace Web Access, as the native AppPortal app and in Desktop Integrated mode. Next to that this incarnation of the vWorkspace AppPortal for Mac has a pretty decent feature set:

• Creating and editing connections; saving them to and loading from a persistent storage (disk database).
• Retrieving application lists from the broker.
• Launching applications in an RDP session.
• Sharing RDP sessions for new applications when a session is already running (session sharing).
• Password management.
• Desktop Integration mode.
• RDP apps auto launch.
• Custom resolution.
• Sound redirection.
• RDP experience.
• Graphics Acceleration.
• Printer mappings.
• Drive mappings.

The client is available for download by logging into http://supportlink.quest.com and from www.vworkspace.com.

Very Interesting to see an active approach for Mac, which installbase is growing.

Especially in colleges the Mac is much used computer brand and as a branch education has high potential for VDI solutions: lot’s of users and a strong use case for BYOPC (Bring Your Own PC).

 
Last Saturday VMware View 4.0 was released for download.

I’ve been looking forward to this release ever since I saw the first demo’s of the Teradici Desktop Protocol PCoIP at VMworld Europe in Cannes last February. Those two days of extra waiting for the product to become GA did not spoil the fun luckily.

This release is important because it now supports vSphere, which is an advantage if you use Virtual Servers on vSphere, because from a management perspective it is nice to have an as much homogenous environment as possible to minimize complexities and support resource shuffling. Also now you can use the advantages of vSphere for your Desktops too.

More or less together with the new release of VMware View, vSphere got an update too (vSphere 4.0 Update 1 released on November 19th). This is not an option but a need: View 4.0 requires vSphere 4.0 Update 1.

For people upgrading from versions 3.x of View there is a compatibility matrix available to see the consequences when the requirements are not fully met.

For questions (FAQ) about licensing View 4 read this.

VMware replaced the thin client compatibility document with a web-app where you can query a db using different criteria suitable for your situation to see what vendors deliver a View 4 certified system with PCoIP support for example.

Chad Sakac posted a View Reference Architecture jointly produced by EMC, Cisco and VMware at his blog virtualgeek, which is definitely worth a look at.

For some time now I am busy converting (P2V) old windows servers (NT4 & 2000). Because the hosts are in a different subnet compared to the P2V candidates and behind a firewall, it took me some time to gather all used ip ports from different documents.

I was happily surprised to see a new article on the VMware blog covering the commonly used ports used by ESX, vCenter and more. VMware released a KB-article with the TCP and UDP Ports for vCenter Server, ESX hosts, and other network components management access:

Products
VMware Consolidated Backup
VMware Converter
VMware Data Recovery
VMware ESX
VMware ESXi
VMware View Manager
VMware Virtual Desktop Manager
VMware VirtualCenter
VMware vCenter Lab Manager
VMware vCenter Orchestrator
VMware vCenter Server
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
VMware vCenter Stage Manager
VMware vCenter Update Manager

Services and agents commonly present in a vSphere environment
CIM HTTP server (insecure service)
CIM HTTPS server
FTP client (insecure service)
FTP server (insecure service)
iSCSI software client
NFS client (insecure service)
NFS server (insecure service)
NIS client
NTP client
SMB client (insecure service)
SNMP server
SSH client
SSH server
Syslog client
Telnet client (insecure service)Telnet server (insecure service)

Link to KB article:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1012382

Source: VMware blog

Vmware released VMware vSphere (ESX) 4 Update 1

New in this release (from the release notes):

VMware View 4.0 support – This release adds support for VMware View 4.0, a solution built specifically for delivering desktops as a managed service from the protocol to the platform.

Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 support –This release adds support for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 as well as 64-bit Windows 2008 R2 as guest OS platforms. In addition, the vSphere Client is now supported and can be installed on a Windows 7 platform. For a complete list of supported guest operating systems with this release, see the VMware Compatibility Guide.

Enhanced Clustering Support for Microsoft Windows – Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) for Windows 2000 and 2003 and Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering is now supported on an VMware High Availability (HA) and Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS) cluster in a limited configuration. HA and DRS functionality can be effectively disabled for individual MSCS virtual machines as opposed to disabling HA and DRS on the entire ESX/ESXi host. Refer to the Setup for Failover Clustering and Microsoft Cluster Service guide for additional configuration guidelines.

Enhanced VMware Paravirtualized SCSI Support – Support for boot disk devices attached to a Paravirtualized SCSI ( PVSCSI) adapter has been added for Windows 2003 and 2008 guest operating systems. Floppy disk images are also available containing the driver for use during the Windows installation by selecting F6 to install additional drivers during setup. Floppy images can be found in the /vmimages/floppies/ folder.

Improved vNetwork Distributed Switch Performance – Several performance and usability issues have been resolved resulting in the following:

• Improved performance when making configuration changes to a vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) instance when the ESX/ESXi host is under a heavy load
• Improved performance when adding or removing an ESX/ESXi host to or from a vDS instance

Increase in vCPU per Core Limit – The limit on vCPUs per core has been increased from 20 to 25. This change raises the supported limit only. It does not include any additional performance optimizations. Raising the limit allows users more flexibility to configure systems based on specific workloads and to get the most advantage from increasingly faster processors. The achievable number of vCPUs per core depends on the workload and specifics of the hardware. For more information see the Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.0 guide.

Enablement of Intel Xeon Processor 3400 Series – Support for the Xeon processor 3400 series has been added. For a complete list of supported third party hardware and devices, see the VMware Compatibility Guide.

Resolved Issues – In addition, this release delivers a number of bug fixes that have been documented in the Resolved Issues section

Release notes:

http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esx40_u1_rel_notes.html

Download: http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/datacenter_downloads/vmware_vsphere_4/4

Products (at least) affected:

VMware just released vSphere 4 update 1. With this update the vSphere client now supports Windows 7 as an OS!

Jon Hall from the Certification team at VMware has confirmed today that holders of the VCP4 certification will get a new license for VMware Workstation 7. There is a process that has to be finished internally within VMware, then the licenses will be released.
VCP3 holders will still receive a license for VMware Workstation 6, as as always been the case with VCP3.

Read original Source

As a lot of others I was looking forward to the GA-date today of VMware View 4.

Unfortunately VMware discovered some issues with the upgrade from view 3 to view 4 and postponed the release till next monday November 23rd.

The planned paired release of vSphere 4.0 Update 1 remained unchanged – update 1 is now available – is also postponed till monday according to the blog virtual cloud

Recently I installed three equal IBM server x 3650 machines with VMware and installed and connected two QLogic HBA’s in each server.

After installing ESX I ran into a problem with one of the machines trying to connect to the datastores. Two of the machines perfectly could see all presented luns after a rescan. One machine however, did not even see a card, no WWN’s available. At first I thought the Storage guy made some mistake in presenting the LUNs, so I called him right away, but he assured me that the faulty machine was targeted. So the investigation continued…

Some quick searches on Google did not bring me any further than pointing me at the HBA config-utility that is initialized at boot time to look if there’s something wrong with the HBA.

While rebooting the host I was looking for the QLogic banner which was not appearing, but instead of a banner I got an error message:

PCI device resource allocation error:

Next when booting into the Console screen there also turned up an error:

When I saw these errors I was not happy assuming I had an hardware issue/failure.

When I googled on the specific error message I just got a few hits, one of them (from a IBM developer site I believe) stated that there is a limited amount of memory available to load ROM bios-apps, and if you have a lot of devices like RAID controllers, HBA controllers, network controllers etc. you may reach a point to where a device ROM  BIOS will not load. He also suggested to turn off unneeded ROM BIOS apps/PXE boot options.

Because I indeed have up to four nics AND a RAID controller AND two H’BA’s, I went into the BIOS and turned off the PXE boot option of the onboard nics in the BIOS:

After the PXE was disabled on the onboard nics, the system apparently had enough resources to load the Qlogic Firmware and also ESX was able to load the driver and see the presented LUNs and booted normally (as the others).