Updates

New updates available on VMware vCenter, VMware View, Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter and Veeam Backup & Replication

Over the last days the following updates are released:

  • VMware vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1b
  • VMware View 5.1.1
  • Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter Plug-in for VMware vSphere beta
  • Veeam Backup & Replication 6.1 Patch 1

Below are the enhancements listed per product.

VMware vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1b

What’s New:

VMware vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1b is a patch release and offers the following improvements:

  • vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1b introduces support for the following vCenter Databases
    • Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, Standard ONE Edition Release 2 [11.2.0.3] – 64 bit
    • Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, Standard ONE Edition Release 2 [11.2.0.3] – 32 bit
  • vCenter Server Appliance Database Support: The DB2 express embedded database provided with the vCenter Server Appliance has been replaced with VMware vPostgres database. This decreases the appliance footprint and reduces the time to deploy vCenter Server further.
  • Resolved Issues: In addition, this release delivers a number of bug fixes that have been documented in the Resolved Issues section.

vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1a has been removed from the VMware download site due to issues encountered when upgrading with an Oracle database for Windows. vCenter Server Update 1a is replaced by vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1b, which is functionally identical to vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1a and includes the fix for the issue encountered when upgrading with an Oracle database for Windows. Please refer to KB 2032277 and the Resolved issues section of the release notes for more information.

More information can be found here.

 

VMware View 5.1.1

VMware View 5.1.1 is a maintenance release that resolves some known issues in the previous releases. Resolved Issues:

View Administrator

  • When the number of View entities managed by one group of View Connection Server instances exceeded 10,000, View Administrator had intermittent problems displaying desktop pools, desktops, and user/group references. The intermittent display problems caused many administrative operations to fail. A View entity can be a desktop pool, desktop, or user/group reference.

View Persona Management

  • View Persona Management failed to replicate a user profile that contained very large files to the remote profile repository. The incomplete replication could result in data loss or data corruption in the user profile.

User Profile Management in View

The following resolved issues concern desktop session management by View Agent and View Connection Server. In certain situations, View closed sessions prematurely, affecting user profile synchronization. In View 5.1.1, View Agent and View Connection Server wait for user profile replication to be completed before closing desktop sessions.

  • When a user logged off soon after adding a large amount of data to the user profile, View shut down the View desktop before the user profile had finished being replicated to the remote profile repository. The incomplete replication could result in data loss or data corruption in the user profile. This issue is resolved when PCoIP or RDP is used.
  • If a user logged off from a View desktop and immediately logged in to a new desktop session within the same pool, user profile data that was created in the new session could not be saved. The user could also lose data that was created in the previous session. This issue applied to desktops running Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, or later Windows operating system releases.

More information can be found here.

A new document on VMware View 5 and SSL Certificates is published. The document provides an example that shows how to obtain signed SSL certificates from a Certificate Authority and ensure that the certificates are in a format that can be used by View servers. More info: Link

 

Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter Plug-in for VMware vSphere beta

The Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC) Plug-in for VMware vSphere Client is a Microsoft-supported solution for IT pros or solution providers who want to convert VMware-based virtual machines to Microsoft Hyper-V®-based virtual machines from vSphere Client. This plug-in extends vSphere Client to facilitate conversions from a virtual machine context menu and without changing configurations on the source VMware host. It is built upon Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter release candidate.

 

Veeam Backup & Replication 6.1 Patch 1

Veeam Backup & Replication 6.1 Patch 1 brings the following additional changes and enhancement:

•Increased synthetic full transformation, and reverse incremental backup performance (up to a few times depending on backup storage).

• Improved Direct SAN Access mode performance by disabling excessive VDDK logging.

• Processing engine should now be much more tolerant to network packet loss.

• Added PowerShell cmdlet for VeeamZIP operation.

• Added new registry value that reverses the sequence of application-aware processing, making jobs try network-less processing mode before network one.

  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VeeaM\Veeam Backup and Replication
  • DWORD: InverseVssProtocolOrder
  • Value = 1
  • To disable (default behavior), value is 0 (false)

• Increased certain network-less application aware processing timeouts to make it work more reliably with applications requiring longer time to perform VSS quiescence.

• Added internet access from virtual lab environment for VMs using port groups other than first.

• Reduced the amount of logs application-aware processing produces on guest VMs.

• Added support for application-aware processing for VM’s that use EFI boot.

More information can be found here

VMware vSphere updates

 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:

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