Posts tagged vCenter
Released: vCenter 2.5 Update 6
Feb 1st
vCenter 2.5 Update 6 was released on Friday. Whilst I’m not working with any 3.5 / 2.5 environments at the moment this is good news because Windows Server 2008 R2 guest customisations have been added. Also added is support for Firefox 3.x using vCenter Web Access. The full release notes are here.
I’m going to stick my neck out a bit and suggest that this may be the final update to vCenter 2.5 before it reaches the end of General Support in May.
ESX 3.5 U5
Dec 4th
I mentioned ESX 3.5 Update 5 only yesterday in my post about VMtools on Windows 2008 R2. Little did I know that 16 hours later I’d be writing about it again to say that it had been released!
The update can be downloaded from VMware’s website as usual. Shamelessly copied from the release notes, here’s what you can expect to have changed:
Enablement of Intel Xeon Processor 3400 Series – Support for the Intel Xeon processor 3400 series has been added. Support includes Enhanced VMotion capabilities. For additional information on previous processor families supported by Enhanced VMotion, see Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support (KB 1003212).
Driver Update for Broadcom bnx2 Network Controller – The driver for bnx2 controllers has been upgraded to version 1.6.9. This driver supports bootcode upgrade on bnx2 chipsets and requires bmapilnx and lnxfwnx2 tools upgrade from Broadcom. This driver also adds support for Network Controller – Sideband Interface (NC-SI) for SOL (serial over LAN) applicable to Broadcom NetXtreme 5709 and 5716 chipsets.
Driver Update for LSI SCSI and SAS Controllers – The driver for LSI SCSI and SAS controllers is updated to version 2.06.74. This version of the driver is required to provide a better support for shared SAS environments.
Newly Supported Guest Operating Systems – Support for the following guest operating systems has been added specifically for this release:
For more complete information about supported guests included in this release, see the VMware Compatibility Guide: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=software.
- Windows 7 Enterprise (32-bit and 64-bit)
- Windows 7 Ultimate (32-bit and 64-bit)
- Windows 7 Professional (32-bit and 64-bit)
- Windows 7 Home Premium (32-bit and 64-bit)
- Windows 2008 R2 Standard Edition (64-bit)
- Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition (64-bit)
- Windows 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition (64-bit)
- Windows 2008 R2 Web Server (64-bit)
- Ubuntu Desktop 9.04 (32-bit and 64-bit)
- Ubuntu Server 9.04 (32-bit and 64-bit)
Naturally you’ll need to upgrade vCenter to Update 5 to gain some of these benefits. The release notes for that mention only one significant enhancement:
Support for High Consolidation in VMware HA Clusters – VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 5 includes significant performance and scalability improvements to VMware HA. Use VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 5 for environments with more than 35 virtual machines per host in an HA cluster.
For information on the ESX Server host settings required for this scalability improvement, see ESX Server host settings required for environments with up to 80 virtual machines per host in an HA Cluster (KB 1012002).
I think that there is a good chance that Update 5 may be the last major update that the 3.5 line of products receives. Or at least it will be for some time. I’ll have some upgrades to do as a result of this release but I’m pushing for upgrades to vSphere like crazy. You know it makes sense.
Setting up Sysprep for vCenter 2.5
Mar 6th
Several of my recent clients (my current one included) have both avoided, failed or just not used Virtual Machine (VM) templates. Depending on who you ask the answer to the question “Why Not?” seems to vary between:
- “I didn’t know that you could do that”
- “We couldn’t make it work”
- “It was too complicated to setup”
- “We haven’t had the time yet”
- “All of our new VMs are different”
After some convincing I have persuaded my current client to let me configure sysprep and a couple of templates for them. I’ve done this a few times before but never really documented it. Admitedly a lot of this is already documented in the Basic Admin Guide for vCenter but this post saves downloading a PDF file.
Which VMs are in which Port Groups
Feb 24th
This took me a little while to get sorted as I had a gap in my PowerShell knowledge around the handling and formating of nested objects. A bit of exploration with get-member and I came up witha working script. It’s based on a post by Hugo Peeters and lists the VMs that are connected to (or belong to) a particular Port Group.
I wanted to know this as I was producing some infrastructure diagrams for a customer and wanted to know the names of VMs in a cluster for each Port Group without having to visit each ESX server. More >
vCenter 2.5 Update 4 released
Feb 24th
Update 4 of vCenter 2.5 (the management tool for VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure) has been released. Not a huge number of new features and probably a few bug fixes is about all you’re going to get from it. The release notes can be found here.
vCenter now supports the customisation of Windows 2008 guest operating systems as well as introducing a Performance Overview plugin that provides a single view of performance metrics – I look forward to having a look at that.
