latoga labs

Today is the big day that vSphere 4.1 is finally released. This dot release is jam packed with new features that some of my clients have been testing for the past six months in beta. The ones that have been strongly received by my enterprise clients include:

• Increased vSphere scalability (2-3x increase in vCenter scale, see config maximums pdf for details)
• Storage IO Control (SIOC)
• Additional Storage Statistics in vCenter
• NFS Performance Enhancements
• Network IO Control (NIOC)
• VMware HA Healthcheck and Operational Status
• Host Affinity Rules
• vMotion Enhancements (5x better vMotion performance, note that small v… )
• Memory Compression
• USB Device Passthrough from an ESX/ESXi Host to a Virtual Machine (a peer of mine said he was amazed at how every USB device he could think to throw at it just work, though I’m sure someone will find exceptions to this.)

There was also some changes in the vSphere licensing. Specifically formalization of vSphere Kits and Editions:

• Kits are pre-packaged for specific use case needs.
• Editions are the different tiers of of increasing product capability to cover the spectrum from small businesses to global enterprises. There were some feature changes between Editions as well.

vSphere 4.1 Editions

Update: Here is Steve Herrod’s blog post on this release as well as Bogomil Balkansky’s blog post.  I also forgot to mention that free ESXi is now being referred to as vSphere Hypervisor, the first tier in the above diagram.

Additional product releases coinciding with vSphere 4.1:

• vCenter Site Recover Manager (SRM) 4.1 was released today as well.  This version of SRM is compatible with vSphere 4.1 and contains a number of new features, see release notes.
• VMware Studio 2.1 was released today as well.  This version is compatible with vSphere 4.1 and adds support for new Linux GOS and OVF versions as well as a slew of other features, see release notes.
• vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.3 was release today as well.  This version is compatible with VC 4.1 as well as additional features, see release notes.

Yesterday was a busy day for releases at VMware:

vSphere 4.0 Update 1 Released

Key enhancements:

• VMware View 4.0 support (hint, hint…)
• Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 support
• Enhanced Clustering Support for Microsoft Windows
• Enhanced VMware Paravirtualized SCSI Support
• Improved vNetwork Distributed Switch Performance
• Increase in vCPU per Core Limit
• Enablement of Intel Xeon Processor 3400 Series
• HA Cluster Configuration Maximum
• IBM DB2 Database Support for vCenter Server
• Pre-Upgrade Checker Tool

For more details see the ESX release notes and vCenter release notes. Update 1 is currently available for download.

vCenter Server Heartbeat 5.5 Update 2 Released

Surprisingly many people are still not familar with vCenter Server Heartbeat, this add-on availability solution for VMware vCenter Server provides 360 degree protection for vCenter Server against a wide range of failure scenarios, including hardware failure, OS failure, network failure and application service failure resulting from natural occurrence or human errors. In addition to protecting vCenter Server, it also protects VMware vCenter Update Manager, VMware vCenter Converter, VMware vCenter Orchestrator, VMware vCenter Guided Consolidation, vCenter Server Database and VMware License Server.  And since it is licensed per vCenter that you want to protect, this protection is extremely cost effective.

Key enhancements:

• Support for the following new vCenter Server platforms:
  • VMware vCenter Server 4.0 Update 1
  • VMware vCenter Server 2.5 Update 5
• Support for the following new OS platforms relative to vCenter Server:
  • Windows Server 2008 SP1 (32-bit and 64-bit)
  • Windows Server 2008 SP2 (32-bit and 64-bit)
  • Windows Server 2003 SP2 (64-bit)
• Availability protection for VMware vCenter Management Webservices
• Single-installer (self-extracting) executable for VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat across 32-bit and 64-bit OS platforms
• Built-in 60-day evaluation mode (triggered from the date of installation)
• Compatibility with vSphere based licensing
  • Note: Existing vCenter Server Heartbeat (vCSHB) customers will be fulfilled with new unique licenses to be used with vCSHB 5.5 U2 builds. These new licenses are only applicable to vCSHB 5.5 U2 builds and will not work with prior versions of vCSHB 5.5

For more details see Server Heartbeat release notes.  Update 2 is currently available for download.

Another release today from VMware: Lab Manager 3.0.1 was recenty released.  While this is a maintenance release, some of the items inlcuded in this release are:

• Support for running Lab Manager on English (US, UK, AUS), French, German, Italian, and Japanese versions of Microsoft Windows 2003
• Optimization for higher scalability and lower response time
• Support for VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 Update 3
• Ability to transfer ownership of Lab Manager objects such as network templates, virtual machine templates, configurations, and media files between different organizations.

Full details about this release can be found in the Release Notes.

(Unfortunately, this announcement comes a day late for my customer who was upgrading his LM2.x installation to 3.0 last night…  :-O ).