Update 2

Hyper-V and NIC teaming and Quick Migration

Apparently Microsoft’s new Hyper-V product is not compatible with NIC teaming. I hope Microsoft quickly resolves this as not being able to team NICS to provide redundancy in 24/7 servers is a big issue.

Also another area where Microsoft seems to be deficient is with Quick Migration. VMWare’s VMotion allows you to quickly migrate a virtual machine to another ESX host so you can perform maintenance on the original host. Microsoft’s Quick Migration should enable the same thing but people have been running into major issues with it as the process has caused some issues causing administrators much grief.

I recently have spoken with many people who are going the Hyper-V route because it’s “free”. I have to argue that now that VMWare’s ESXi is free, people really have no excuse not to go with VMWare based on their proven track record in the industry. These people are quick to point out the recent debacle with Update 2 but then you can’ t tell me that Microsoft hasn’t royally screwed up a patch in the past either. At the end of the day I still say that VMWare is your best bet at this point in time to keep your servers running smoothly.

-RP

VMWare - Major Bug with ESX 3.5 Update 2

Hi folks, breaking news in the virtual world! Apparently ESX 3.5 Update 2 is wreaking havoc with people’s ESX servers. According to reports it is throwing “A general system error occurred: Internal Error”. This is a known problem at VMWare and there is no known fix as of yet.

 You can read more about it here.

 This goes back to a rule of thumb I always like to follow with patching. When a patch comes out, don’t apply it right away. Sit on it for awhile and adopt a wait and see approach to see if there are any ill effects experienced by others in the industry before you apply to your production systems. Also install the patch in a sandbox environment and do a flurry of tests to see if you can get it to break.

After it seems that the patch is acceptable then you can apply it to your production systems. This will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

 -RP