Comments on: VMware Releases Update 2

By: Virtualization Short Take #16 - blog.scottlowe.org - The weblog of an IT pro specializing in virtualization, storage, and servers

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 03:03:38 +0000

[...] monitoring is now fully supported and not experimental? One thing that caught my eye when I first announced Update 2 was VSS support. What I hadn’t really noted about this was the fact that this extends into [...]

By: slowe

slowe — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:10:54 +0000

Jon,

Thanks for letting me know. I’ll have a look at the article and contact SearchVMware.com.

By: Jon

Jon — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:44:42 +0000

Scott, I know it is not the correct form to contact you but in your article:”VMware ESX network redundancy via Fibre Channel multipathing” in SearchVMware.com, I think that the images are in wrong order.

BR,
Jon

By: Inshik

Inshik — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:38:21 +0000

I found some really good information about how EVC works on VMware’s website:
http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/1022

By: Stephen Foskett

Stephen Foskett — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:28:09 +0000

Scott,

Any idea about the new support for Storage VMotion on iSCSI/FC? I assume this is still in shared storage/VMFS, and I thought that worked already! Do they now support it in RDM?

Stephen

By: Henk

Henk — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 08:56:08 +0000

Just updated 2 ESXi hosts.
Finally there is more to see under health status (hardware monitoring), but still not all that I want to see. Sticking to ESX until then i guess

By: slowe

slowe — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 18:26:23 +0000

Jason,

The Enhanced VMotion stuff was first discussed last year at VMworld 2007, and you’re absolutely right on target–this will greatly facilitate hardware migrations.

As for live cloning, it really depends upon the specific details of how it’s implemented. Once I’ve had a chance to actually use it (hopefully in the next week or so), I’ll be able to speculate about some ways in which live cloning could be used. Duncan at Yellow Bricks already mentioned one–live cloning a machine with problems, disconnecting the network, and then troubleshooting the clone. However, I really suspect that there are some very innovative things that could be done with live cloning. It will be interesting to see how that develops.

By: Jason Boche

Jason Boche — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 13:50:23 +0000

There is a heck of a lot that excites me about this release that I’ve been wishing for. To name a few:

1. Windows Server 2008 support
2. Enhanced VMotion Compatibility. I wasn’t aware this was in the works but it sounds helpful for making the transition to newer hardware platforms now that our datacenter has some ESX infrastructure up for retirement within the year.
3. Remote CLI is now out of experimental/beta status - this was needed.
4. Fixed HA “flakeyness” which was highly dependent/vulnerable to DNS infrastructure.
5. VirtualCenter alarms updated - always room for granular improvement here.
6. Consolidation updates - Very much needed for larger organizations with gigantic AD domains and subnet browser limitations making the addition of consolidation candidates on remote subnets impossible. Now you can simply type in consolidation candidates to be converted among other things.
7. Live cloning - I’m with you here Scott. Interesting, but I’m curious about a) how it works, b) practicality?
8. Windows Single Sign On Support - VC SSO has been around as a hidden feature for a few months but now it is no longer a secret. Some security concerned folks have big problems with this but I say bah humbug. Let’s move forward with the innovation.
9. Plug-in updates - I’ll always welcome these. Hopefully a bit more stable than the initial releases. Previously the plug-ins have been very sensitive to back end availability, crashing and unloading themselves at any presence of issues.

By: Jason Boche

Jason Boche — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 13:23:04 +0000

VMware keeps raising the bar. This is great!