The Real (and Virtual) Adventures of Nathan the IT Guy » hypervisor

ESXi 4.1 Update 2 Release last week.

Nathan Simon — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 15:16:13 +0000

Did you notice? I didn’t notice either until yesterday, ESXi 4.1 Update 2 is out, and its basically an update that supports more CPUs and OS’, CPU’s and OS’ that have been release after ESXi 4.1 Update 1. Here is an insert from VMware.com

What’s New

The following information describes some of the enhancements available in this release of VMware ESXi:

Support for new processors – ESXi 4.1 Update 2 supports AMD Opteron 6200 series (Interlagos) and AMD Opteron 4200 series (Valencia).
Note: For the AMD Opteron 6200 and 4200 series (Family 15h) processors, ESX/ESXi 4.1 Update 2 treats each core within a compute unit as an independent core, except while applying licenses. For the purpose of licensing, ESX/ESXi treats each compute unit as a core. For example, although a processor with 8 compute units can provide the processor equivalent of 16 cores on ESX/ESXi 4.1 Update 2, it only uses 8 licenses.
Support for additional guest operating systems — ESXi 4.1 Update 2 adds support for the following guest operating systems:

Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Enterprise, Home Premium, Professional, Ultimate

Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 Datacenter, Enterprise, Standard, Web Server

Redhat Enterprise Linux 4.9, 5.7 and 6.1

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Desktop 10 Service Pack 4

CentOS 4.9, 5.6 and 6.0

Oracle Linux 4.9, 5.7, 6.0 and 6.1

Ubuntu 11.04 Server, Desktop

Asianux Server 3 SP4

For a complete list of guest operating systems supported with this release, see the VMware Compatibility Guide.
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Support for additional guest operating system -ESX 4.1 Update 2 adds support for Ubuntu 11.10 guest operating system. For a complete list of guest operating systems supported with this release, see the VMware Compatibility Guide.

Resolved Issues - In addition, this release delivers a number of bug fixes that are documented in the Resolved Issues section.

I do not see any reason for going to ESXi 4.1 Update 2, unless you work for a company that follows strict policy, or hasn’t renewed support with VMware. Other wise I would start migrating towards ESXi 5.0.

-NS

VMware ESXi 5.0 Release Features

Nathan Simon — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 02:17:58 +0000

I have the latest ESXi 5 features, check them out! There might be some additions closer to the release date but as of right now, it looks like there is a good number of improvements.

• Build on the vSphere ESXi hypervisor architecture
• vSphere Auto Deploy combining host profiles, Image Builder and PXE
• Unified CLI framework, allowing consistency of authentication, roles and auditing.
• Support for up to 1 TB of memory
• Support for 32 vCPU’s per VM
• Nonhardware accelerated 3D graphics for Windows Aero support
• USB 3.0 device support
• UEFI virtual BIOS
• Host UEFI boot support
• New GUI to configure multicore vCPUs
• Client-connected USB devices
• Smart card reader support for VMs
• Apple Mac OS X Server 10.6 (Snow Leopard) guest OS support
• Support for up to 512 VMs
• Support for up to 160 Logical CPUs and 2 TB or RAM
• Improved SNMP support
• Storage driven storage delivery based on the VMware-Aware Storage APIs
• Improved version of the Cluster File System, VMFS5
• Accelerator for specific use with View (VDI) workloads, providing a read cache optimized for recognizing, handling and deduplicating VDI client images.
• iSCSI user interface support
• Storage APIs – Array Integration: Thin Provisioning enabling reclaiming blocks of a thin provisioned LUN on the array when a virtual disk is deleted
• Swap to SSD
• 2TB+ LUN support
• Storage vMotion snapshot support
• vNetwork Distributed Switch improvements providing improved visibility in VM traffic
• ESXi Firewall protecting the ESXi 5.0 management interface
• A browser-based, fully-extensible, platform-independent implementation of the vSphere Client based on Adobe Flex.
• vCenter Server Appliance
• Inventory Extensibility: providing a manager to monitor partner extensions.
• vCenter Solutions Manager, providing a consistent interface to configure and monitor vCenter-integrated solutions developed by VMware and third parties.
• System message logging enhancements
• Revamped VMware High Availability (HA) with Fault Domain Manager
• All hosts in cluster can be primary nodes
• Cluster also uses shared storage as a channel for heartbeat detection

I am curious to see how the Adobe Flex Web front-end will fair compared to the web based interface, it can definitely only be better!

VMworld 2010

Nathan Simon — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 04:07:19 +0000

Hey everyone, this is hot off the presses, I am going to VMworld 2010! I am leaving Sunday am for sunny California. The convention takes place from Monday to Thursday, where I will be involved in many labs and group discussions. I am mainly concentrating on VMware View 4 and Troubleshooting ESX Issues. There are also a few awesome parties to attend as well.

VMworld will stage more than 18,000 lab seats and conduct up to 480 simultaneous Lab sessions during the four-day event. To build out this environment, we have committed 75,000+ man-hours in Lab creation and development to produce 30 Lab topics – all powered by vSphere Hypervisor, formerly vSphere ESXi. The Labs will cover everything from virtualized desktop infrastructure, through the vSphere-powered data center and into the VMware-powered cloud. With easy access to more than 100 VMware Subject Matter Experts on hand to answer questions and explore options, you’ll get one-on-one attention when you need it, and still have the flexibility to move at your own pace. Forget pre-registration. With over 40 hours of available Lab time throughout the conference, you’re free to experience the latest in VMware offerings on your own schedule.

I will update you all as to how the even is going and if i learn any juicy information, of course if I am not able to share it, I definitely will not post about it!

-NS

XenClient Express

Nathan Simon — Tue, 18 May 2010 01:37:35 +0000

Citrix delivered on the IT Kit for pro’s but the official release of its Hypervisor for desktops and laptops won’t ship until later this year.

The XenClient Express kit, which is available free for public download today, includes the bare metal hypervisor, the Citrix Receiver for XenClient and the Synchronizer for XenClient.

Using XenClient, users can run multiple virtual machines on a single laptop that are secure and mobile at the same time, Templeton said. Virtual machines can be run online and offline and synchronized in a fully flexible fashion, he claimed.

It would be nice to have desktop and laptop operating systems published to hardware, using offline mode with synchronization is very cool… I will definitely have to give this a try.

-NS

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Nathan Simon — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:55:49 +0000

There is some new documentation out for System Center VMM, updated January 7th 2010. There are 7 documents in total if you are interested in Hyper-V and VMM. Go here to download documents, like “Virtual Machine Manager Deployment Guide” or the ” Virtual Machine Manager Operations Guide”

-NS

Virtualization in General

Nathan Simon — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 03:09:56 +0000

Hey there folks, well I know 80% of the worlds population have an idea of what virtualization is, what it does, and why we all should get on the bandwagon… but there are some out there that still do not have a clue what VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix are doing with virtualization. Since there are those with questions, I thought I would provide some links for those people.

The first link I am providing is from one of my favorite resources in the world. Petri IT Knowledgebase by Daniel Petri, I wont get into why this is an important resource as many of my readers will already know. The link is for an article that David Davis wrote about Server Virtualization, here’s an insert from the beginning of the article…

“There are many types of virtualization- server, network, storage, and more. In this article, we will demystify these complex terms, explain what they can do for you, and name specific products that provide these functions. So prepare for the smoke to be cleared…” read the rest here.

The second link is a to a video that might be helpful to some readers, and maybe a waste of 3 minutes for some, hey at least its only 3 minutes! “Information Technology Explained in 3 Minutes of Less : What is Virtualization” check it out here.

Anyways, if I help shed some light on virtualization for at least a couple people I’ll be happy!