Since everyone else in the world is heralding the release of vSphere 4.1, I figured I would post some bad news. The stuff you may want to know BEFORE you jump into upgrading to vSphere 4.1. Before I start, I want to make it clear that vSphere 4.1 is a great product overall. And I have already been leaning to ESXi, so the announcement that this will be the last release with the “traditional” ESX has been expected. I will talk about ESXi and its improvements in a later post. I just want you to be aware of these rather significant Gotchas.
vSphere Install and Upgrade Best Practices KB Articles and Links
So, I use NewsGator to aggregate a BAZILLION feeds from several sources, blogs, like this one, actual news feeds and a bunch of VMware feeds. The VMware feeds are from the VI:OPS and VMTN forums. The VMTN forums allow you to create a custom feed by selecting the RSS link at the bottom right of each page or you can get a feed from a specific section of the forum by clicking the link on the bottom left of a list. On of the custom feed options is to get a feed of the new KB articles.
VMware has released quite a lot of new KB articles surrounding vSphere. They just released nice best practice guidelines for installing or upgrading to ESX 4 and vCenter 4. They are short and to the point. There is also a nice article covering best practices for upgrading an ESX 3.x virtual machine to ESX 4.0. One thing I noticed, but never thought about is this :
“Note: If you are using dynamic DNS, some Windows versions require ipconfig/reregister to be run.”
Eric Seibert over at vSphere-Land posted a nice set of “missing links” for everything vSphere. This is a nice, comprehensive set of links to evetrything you need for vSphere upgrades or installs.So, go check that out as well.
VMware vSphere Upgrade Path Overview
Many of you are wonder how you will go about upgrading to VMware vSphere when it is release. Well I’m here to say don’t worry. The upgrade path from ESX 2.x & 3.x is very painless and fairly simple. A lot of you will remember all the phone you have had in the past performing upgrades and scripting installs, well VMware is quickly trying to make all of that a thing from the past with new features available in vSphere.
Read More here
Just some more vSphere information
Here is some information about vSphere that I thought would be good to share with the world. As with everything else this is just a drop in the bucket. I’m currently working on putting together some upgrade videos and screenshots so take a look back and hopefully I will have them done by the end of the week.
Here is some interesting information about vSpehere and what it supports keep in mind these are just some notes I jotted down:
ESX 4 Hosts (vSphere Host)
256VM’s per host
64 Cores per host
512GB Ram per host
vSphere VMs (Hardware version 7)
8 vCPUs
256GB Ram
VMDirectPath I/O
Hot Plug Support (Supports CPU’s and Memory)
ESX 2.x and 3.x VM support
Paravirtual SCSI adapter
MSCS 2008
Persistent Reservations in vmkernel
LSI Logic SAS (Virtual SAS controller)
Networking Improvements
New iSCSI stack with 10-30% improved performance
TCPIP 2 Support (Based on FreeBSD 6.1 / IPv6 / locking and threading capabilties)
VMXNet3
MSI/MSI-X
Receive Side Scaling
VLAN offloading
VMware Directpath I/O
Storage Improvements
SCSI-3 Compliant
VMFS still SCSI-2
Target PortGroup Support (TPGS)
Asymmetric Logical Unit (ALUA)
Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA)
Updated iSCSI stack
Native SATA
Service Console
64-bit, 2.6 based Linux kernel compatible with RHEL 5.2
Supports for both 32bit and 64bit applications
root file system stored in VMDK
vmkernel runs and owns device drivers only 64-bit
Address Space layout Randomization (ASLR)
No Linux dev packagers and libraries
CPU
Enhanced Intel step down
Enhanced AMD Power Now
Security
Trusted Platform Module (TPM)
Digitally signed and validated modules
Memory integrity techniques with microprocessor capabilities to protect against buffer-overflow
Guided Consolidation
500 Simultaneous Physical Machines
Modular Plug-in can be installed on different machine
Coverter
Physical / Virtual / 3rd party
Server 2008 Support
Covert Hyper-V Machines to VM’s
Update Manager
ESX / ESXi and Virtual Appliance Upgrades
Upgrade Virtual Hardware
VMware Tools
Base Line Groups
Upgrade vcenter steps
No SQL 2000 Support
2.x & 3.x Upgade Path
Upgrade vCenter
Upgrade Update Manager
Use Upgrade Manager to Upgrade Hosts
Upgrade VMware Tools, then the VMware Hardware.
vSphere Host Update Utility
3.x to 4.x
Dosn’t Upgrade VMFS Datastores or VMs
Installs with vSphere client
Support Rollback for ESX only
Can be used to install patch releases to standalone hosts
Copies Script and ISO to ESX hosts reboots and installs
Getting New Performance Overview Charts Working in VC2.5U4
One of the New features of vCenter 2.5 Update 4 is the “Performance Overview Charts”. But, if you do not follow the proper upgrade steps, it will not work properly. I am a big fan of the “Complete uninstall and install fresh” method. You can make sure all of the bits are gone before the upgrade. Obviously, you will need to make a backup copy of your license files and, if changes were made, the vpxd.cfg file.If you look at the release notes, you will see a link to a VMware Knowledgebase Article about how to get the charts working. It tells you that you will need to install the Java Development Kit6u11. You will also need to set path info into the environment, copy the files from the CD to a local disk and run install from there.
But there are those of us that will just download the zip file, uncompress it, and run setup.exe. No backups, no uninstall first. This is why VMware has several KB articles about how to get the charts working, depending on how you upgraded.
The first KB Article deals with not stopping the Web services first. Another KB Article deals with the need for an updated Oracle ODBC driver if you have an Oracle database. Finally, for those of us living on the edge, there is a KB Article if you are suing the bundled SQL Express database.
So, here are my steps in a nutshell:
- Backup the databases, license file and (if needed) vpxd.cfg
- Uninstall the old version of vCenter, VUM, Converter, and Capacity Planner
- Install the Java Development Kit6u11
- Edit the environment path and append C:Program FilesJavajdk1.6.0_11bin
- Add a system variable of JAVA_HOME to point to C:Program FilesJavajdk1.6.0_11
- Install vCenter, pointing to the vCenter and VUM databases when prompted
- Copy the vpxperfCharts directory from the CD to local disk
- Run install.bat from vpxperfCharts on the local disk
- Uninstall Capacity Planner (You don’t need it by now, do you???)
Obviously, if you have your Program Files on a different drive or path than the default, it will need to be entered appropriately in steps 4 and 5.
Well, there you have it. Setup Performance Overview Charts in 9 easy steps.