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Temper Your New Release Excitement & Protect Yourself

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With all the new releases that have spun out of VMware in the past few months it’s great to see all the excitement from my clients wanting to upgrade (and with good reason).  There is an exciting set of new features and capabilities to add value to your environment in these releases.

However, make sure you temper your new release excitement by checking and double checking your planned upgrades to ensure everything in the infrastructure is compatabile with the new releases.  A great place to start is the Release Notes for each product’s new version.  Then check the VMware Product Interoperability Matrixes and the VMware Compatibility Guide.  The Matrixes help you understand which versions of VMware products have been tested and support working with each other (did you know that SRM 5.5 won’t work with ESXi 5.0 U3?). And the Guide helps you understand all the partner ecosystem dependancies for different aspects of the VMware solution set (did you know that SRM 5.5 doesn’t yet have an EMC SRDF SRA available?)

I use the SRM examples above as I’ve had clients in the past who rushed to upgrade SRM without checking these two resources…and broke their deployment.  When dealing with infrastructure components that are the foundation for your entire enterprise make sure you upgrade the systems from the bottom up as well as measure twice and cut once…

VMware Releases vSphere 4.1 & Licensing Changes

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Today is the big day that vSphere 4.1 is finally released. This dot release is jam packed with new features that some of my clients have been testing for the past six months in beta. The ones that have been strongly received by my enterprise clients include:

  • Increased vSphere scalability (2-3x increase in vCenter scale, see config maximums pdf for details)
  • Storage IO Control (SIOC)
  • Additional Storage Statistics in vCenter
  • NFS Performance Enhancements
  • Network IO Control (NIOC)
  • VMware HA Healthcheck and Operational Status
  • Host Affinity Rules
  • vMotion Enhancements (5x better vMotion performance, note that small v… 🙂 )
  • Memory Compression
  • USB Device Passthrough from an ESX/ESXi Host to a Virtual Machine (a peer of mine said he was amazed at how every USB device he could think to throw at it just work, though I’m sure someone will find exceptions to this.)

There was also some changes in the vSphere licensing. Specifically formalization of vSphere Kits and Editions:

  • Kits are pre-packaged for specific use case needs.
  • Editions are the different tiers of of increasing product capability to cover the spectrum from small businesses to global enterprises. There were some feature changes between Editions as well.

vSphere 4.1 Editions

Update: Here is Steve Herrod’s blog post on this release as well as Bogomil Balkansky’s blog post.  I also forgot to mention that free ESXi is now being referred to as vSphere Hypervisor, the first tier in the above diagram.

Additional product releases coinciding with vSphere 4.1:

  • vCenter Site Recover Manager (SRM) 4.1 was released today as well.  This version of SRM is compatible with vSphere 4.1 and contains a number of new features, see release notes.
  • VMware Studio 2.1 was released today as well.  This version is compatible with vSphere 4.1 and adds support for new Linux GOS and OVF versions as well as a slew of other features, see release notes.
  • vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.3 was release today as well.  This version is compatible with VC 4.1 as well as additional features, see release notes.

VMware vSphere 4 U1 and Server Heartbeat 5.5 U2 Released

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Yesterday was a busy day for releases at VMware:

vSphere 4.0 Update 1 Released

Key enhancements:

  • VMware View 4.0 support (hint, hint…)
  • Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 support
  • Enhanced Clustering Support for Microsoft Windows
  • Enhanced VMware Paravirtualized SCSI Support
  • Improved vNetwork Distributed Switch Performance
  • Increase in vCPU per Core Limit
  • Enablement of Intel Xeon Processor 3400 Series
  • HA Cluster Configuration Maximum
  • IBM DB2 Database Support for vCenter Server
  • Pre-Upgrade Checker Tool

For more details see the ESX release notes and vCenter release notes. Update 1 is currently available for download.

vCenter Server Heartbeat 5.5 Update 2 Released

Surprisingly many people are still not familar with vCenter Server Heartbeat, this add-on availability solution for VMware vCenter Server provides 360 degree protection for vCenter Server against a wide range of failure scenarios, including hardware failure, OS failure, network failure and application service failure resulting from natural occurrence or human errors. In addition to protecting vCenter Server, it also protects VMware vCenter Update Manager, VMware vCenter Converter, VMware vCenter Orchestrator, VMware vCenter Guided Consolidation, vCenter Server Database and VMware License Server.  And since it is licensed per vCenter that you want to protect, this protection is extremely cost effective.

Key enhancements:

  • Support for the following new vCenter Server platforms:
    • VMware vCenter Server 4.0 Update 1
    • VMware vCenter Server 2.5 Update 5
  • Support for the following new OS platforms relative to vCenter Server:
    • Windows Server 2008 SP1 (32-bit and 64-bit)
    • Windows Server 2008 SP2 (32-bit and 64-bit)
    • Windows Server 2003 SP2 (64-bit)
  • Availability protection for VMware vCenter Management Webservices
  • Single-installer (self-extracting) executable for VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat across 32-bit and 64-bit OS platforms
  • Built-in 60-day evaluation mode (triggered from the date of installation)
  • Compatibility with vSphere based licensing
    • Note: Existing vCenter Server Heartbeat (vCSHB) customers will be fulfilled with new unique licenses to be used with vCSHB 5.5 U2 builds. These new licenses are only applicable to vCSHB 5.5 U2 builds and will not work with prior versions of vCSHB 5.5

For more details see Server Heartbeat release notes.  Update 2 is currently available for download.