VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘update’

I just received the third VMware email customer update about the August 12 time bomb bug. Unfortunately, this email informs customers that the effort to find a resolution where VM reboots could be avoided has not produced a reliable process. The email does indicate that the express patches are working properly and are compatible with VMware Update Manager. Also, The previously set deadline of 6 PM PST today (AUG 13) for the download availability of the corrected ESX/ESXi update 2 install media is still on schedule.

Here’s the body of the entire email as I received it: Read the rest of this entry »

Without any official announcement, email, or news release VMware made ESX 3.5 Update 2 available for download on Friday (July 25). I found out about it after checking Planet v12n where I saw that VMBlog.com,  Yellow-bricks.com and NTPro.nl had new posts about the release. Update 2 ushers in new features as well as several bug fixes. Check out the new ESX 3.5 VMware Infrastructure 3 Release Notes at VMware’s downloads page. Follow the previous link to read all of the release notes, but the following are some of high lites for me:

• Enhanced VMotion
• VSS Quiescing
• Hot Extend a running VM’s virtual disk
• More SAS array support
• 10Gb iSCSI and NFS support
• Service Console update to RHEL 3.0 U9
• Full support for individual VM HA fail over.
• Live Cloning of VMs
• All patches prior to this release are included
• New VC Alarms
• HA no longer requires DNS resolution (no longer have to manually modify /etc/hosts)

It’s good to see positive and exciting news from VMware (and definitely needed if you have been watching the stock price!) Update 2′s release combined with ESXi 3.5 being available for free download should make next week very intersting.

I’ve copied some details from the release notes about the features listed above in the rest of this post.

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updated 013010: several commenters indicated an issue with trasfering large files via the datastore browser. As of VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6, VMware has fixed this issue. So, be sure to upgrade! More on this here.

Running the latest version of ESX3.5 enables a lot of usability enhancements in the VI Client. Many of the administrative tasks and configurations previously performed on the Service Console or by third party tools are now accessible as new options directly from the GUI. For example, you previously could not use the Datastore Browser to upload files such as ISOs to the ESX hosts, but instead had to use a tool such as WinSCP or other similar methods. With the ESX3.5 VI Client you can now transfer files right from the client. What makes this native ability even cooler is the fact that you no longer have to enable remote root access or create a special user. If you connect the VI Client to VirtualCenter as a local administrator, or if you connect to the ESX host as root you can use the VI Client to upload files without any other configurations.

The following screenshot of the VI Client is showing the Summary Tab of the ESX host.
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