The last weeks a couple of new or updated technical readings are published.  Here is an overview:

- VMware vCenter Update Manager Performance and Best Practices for vSphere 4.1.

- VMware vCenter Server Performance and Best Practices for vSphere 4.1.

- VMware Host Profiles – Technical Overview.

- Deploying 10 Gigabit Ethernet on VMware vSphere 4.0 with Cisco Nexus 1000V, VMware vNetwork Standard and Distributed Switches.

- vSphere 4.0 to 4.1 differences.

- VMware vSphere on NetApp Storage Best Practices Technical Report v2.1.

- Sample chapter(5) from the HA and DRS deepdrive book from Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman.

 

During a health check of a vSphere environment i notices dropped packets on several VMs. In ESXTOP the %DRPRX value showed dropped receive packets on several VMs. In the screenshot an example:

The customer uses vSphere 4.0 build 244038. All the VMs that experiencing the dropped packets problem were Windows 2008 with an  E1000 NIC.

E1000 — An emulated version of the Intel 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet NIC. A driver for this NIC is not included with all guest operating systems. Typically Linux versions 2.4.19 and later, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and later, and Windows Server 2003 (32-bit) and later include the E1000 driver.

On of the Windows 2008 VMs had no packets drops. The only difference with the other VMs was that the IPv6 protocol binding on the NIC was disabled. After disabling the IPv6 protocol binding on all the other VMs the packet drops is disappear.

Some services require the IPv6 binding, so disabling the IPv6 binding was no option for the customer.  All the other Windows 2008 machines with the VMXNET3 NIC and IPv6 enabled had no packet drops. After changing all the VMs with Windows 2008 and the E1000 NIC to the VMXNET3 NIC solves the problem.

The VMXNET 3 adapter is the next generation of a paravirtualized NIC designed for performance, and is not related to VMXNET or VMXNET 2. It offers all the features available in VMXNET 2, and adds several new features like multiqueue support (also known as Receive Side Scaling in Windows), IPv6 offloads, and MSI/MSI-X interrupt delivery.

Whenever possible i suggest to use the VMXNET3 driver for Windows 2008 Operating Systems.

 

The new vSphere 4.1 release offers a lot of new cool features and enhancements. Here’s a list What’s New in vSphere 4.1.  When upgrading to vSphere 4.1 there are a couple of things to think about before starting:

• Make sure your systems and components are supported, check the Hardware Compatibility Guide.
• Verify that other products are compatible with vSphere 4.1. For example VMware View 4 is not supported on vSphere 4.1. VMware View composer does not support 64-bit operating systems.  
• vCenter 4.1 server requires a 64-bit OS. 32-bit Operating Systems are not supported anymore for vCenter 4.1 server.
• vSphere 4.1 and its subsequent update and patch releases are the last releases to include both ESX and ESXi hypervisor architectures. Future major releases of VMware vSphere will include only the VMware ESXi architecture. For this reason, VMware recommends that deployments of vSphere 4.x utilize the ESXi hypervisor architecture. When migrate to ESXi all the script and programs (such as hardware monitoring agents and backup agents), that uses the Service Console needs to replaced. More information can be the following links ESX4.1 is the last ESX what do i do now and in the  ESXi41 Migration Guide.
• vSphere 4.1 support scripted installation for ESXi. You cannot use scripted installation to install ESXi to a USB device!  Here are some good links for scripted ESXi 4.1 installations:  Kenneth van Ditmarsch, Setting up vSphere ESXi 4.1 scripted installation, Kendrick Coleman, ESX 4.1 Kickstart install, Billhill,  Setting up vSphere ESX 4.1 scripted installation from Ubuntu and Deploy ESXi 4.1 using Scripted install feature.
• ESXi comes in two editions, the vSphere Hypervisor (free version) with limited features and the enterprise ESXI.
• The VMware Knowledgebase has best practices for installing and upgrading vSphere 4.1. Installing ESX 4..1 and vCenter 4.1 best practices and Upgrading to ESX 4.1 and vCenter 4.1 best practices.
• Get yourself familiar with tools as PowerCLI, vCLI and the VMware Management Assistant (vMA).These tools helps you to automate, configure  and troubleshoot vSphere 4.1 environments. More information can be found on the following links vCLI, PowerCLI and vMA.
• Before upgrading check the Knowlegde Base from VMware for issues with  vSphere 4.1. For example Upgrading vCenter Server 4.0 to 4.1 fails with the error: Exception Thrown while executing SQL script.

 

VMware HealthAnalyzer automates the collection of VMware Infrastructure or VMware vSphere™ inventory, configuration and utilization data, analyzes data and recommends grades, and generates a report card that presents observations, findings and data categorized by VMware Health Check best practices. HealthAnalyzer can be used by VMware consultants and VMware Solution Providers to improve efficiency and accelerate the delivery of a services engagement such as the VMware Health Check. Consultants can use HealthAnalyzer as a Health Check workbench to capture and review observations, findings, and data, provide actionable recommendations, and generate a Health Check Report for your customer.

What’s new in VMware HealthAnalyzer version 3.0:

-         A new catalog of best practices developed for VMware vSphere

-         Observations tab presents observations (summary of findings),recommendations and a justification for each analyzed best practice area

-         Enhanced best practices navigation pane that provides powerful filtering and grouping capabilities

-         Collection of VMware VirtualCenter/vCenter diagnostics data

-         New Virtual Appliance Web Console Management User Interface

-         Support for running the HealthAnalyzer virtual application on Windows 7

-         Base Health Check mode enables use of HealthAnalyzer as a presales tool

-         Select observations/BP to include in the Health Check report

-         New Health Check Report

-         A new catalog of best practices developed for VMware vSphere

VMware HealthAnalyzer 3.0 is available from the VMware partner central.

 VMware released the following new product updates:

·        VMware ESX(i) 4.0 Update 2

·        VMware vCenter Server 4.0 Update 2

·        VMware vCenter Update Manager 4.0 Update 2

·        VMware Data Recovery 1.2

Always test these updates before deploying in production and make sure that other products (for example VMware View and VMware SRM) are supported with the new updates! Here are the highlights per product update:

VMware ESX(i) 4.0 Update 2

ESX 4.0 Update 2 | 10 Jun 2010 | Build 261974
VMware Tools | 10 Jun 2010 | Build 261974

What’s New

The following information provides highlights of some of the enhancements available in this release of VMware ESX:

• Enablement of Fault Tolerance Functionality for Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors without Fault Tolerance. vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables Fault Tolerance functionality for the Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors.

• Enablement of Fault Tolerance Functionality for Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors without Fault Tolerance. vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables Fault Tolerance functionality for the Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors.

• Enablement of IOMMU Functionality for AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors without input/output memory management unit (IOMMU). vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables IOMMU functionality for the AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors.

• Enhancement of the esxtop/resxtop utility— vSphere 4.0 Update 2 includes an enhancement of the performance monitoring utilities, esxtop and resxtop. The esxtop/resxtop utilities now provide visibility into the performance of NFS datastores in that they display the following statistics for NFS datastores: Reads/s, writes/s, MBreads/s, MBwrtn/s, cmds/s, GAVG/s(guest latency).

• Additional Guest Operating System Support— ESX/ESXi 4.0 Update 2 adds support for Ubuntu 10.04. For a complete list of supported guest operating systems with this release, see the VMware Compatibility Guide.

Resolved Issues – In addition, this release delivers a number of bug fixes that have been documented in the Resolved Issues section.

The following bug is solved in this release:

For devices using the roundrobin PSP the value configured for the –iops option changes after ESX host reboot. If a device that is controlled by the roundrobin PSP is configured to use the --iops option, the value set for the --iops option is not retained if the ESX Server is rebooted.

VMware vCenter Server 4.0 Update 2

ESX 4.0 Update 2 | 10 Jun 2010 | Build 261974
VMware Tools | 10 Jun 2010 | Build 261974

What’s New

  Guest Operating System Customization Improvements: vCenter Server now supports customization of the following guest operating systems:

• Windows XP Professional SP2 (x64) serviced by Windows Server 2003 SP2

• SLES 11 (x32 and x64)

• SLES 10 SP3 (x32 and x64)

• RHEL 5.5 Server Platform (x32 and x64)

• RHEL 5.4 Server Platform (x32 and x64)

• RHEL 4.8 Server Platform (x32 and 64)

• Debian 5.0 (x32 and x64)

• Debian 5.0 R1 (x32 and x64)

• Debian 5.0 R2 (x32 and x64)

  Resolved Issues:In addition, this release delivers a number of bug fixes that have been documented in the Resolved Issues section.

 

VMware vCenter Update Manager 4.0 Update 2

VMware vCenter Update Manager 4.0 Update 2 | 10 Jun 2010 | Build 264019

What’s New

• Improved reliability of operations on hosts in low bandwidth, high latency, or lossy networks – Update Manager 4.0 Update 2 performs operations on hosts reliably when working in slow networks, networks where packet loss occurs, or WAN environments. In earlier Update Manager releases, if host operations took more than two hours to complete, the tasks might timeout and fail. See Extend the default timeout periods for vCenter Server, ESX/ESXi hosts, and vCenter Update Manager (KB 1017253) for more information about the problem. In Update Manager 4.0 Update 2 such tasks complete successfully.

VMware vCenter Update Manager 4.0 Update 2 adds enhancements and bug fixes, which are described in the Resolved Issues section. This release contains known issues described in Known Issues.

 

VMware Data Recovery 1.2

Data Recovery | 18 MAY 2010 | Build 260251

What’s New

The following enhancements have been made for this release of Data Recovery.

• File Level Restore (FLR) is now available for use with Linux.

• Each vCenter Server instance supports up to ten Data Recovery backup appliances.

• The vSphere Client plug-in supports fast switching among Data Recovery backup appliances.

• Miscellaneous vSphere Client Plug-In user interface enhancements including:
  • The means to name backup jobs during their creation.

  • Additional information about the current status of destination disks including the disk’s health and the degree of space savings provided by the deduplication store’s optimizations.

  • Information about the datastore from which virtual disks are backed up.

Here’s a handy comparison table between VDR 1.1 and VDR 1.2:

All the product updates can be found on the VMware download page.