VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘upgrade’

VMware engineer Michael White’s post 64 bit is almost here – are you ready? on the Uptime (VMware and Business Continuity) Blog foretells of the future 64 bit requirement of both vCenter and SRM (Site Recovery Manager). White writes:

“I wanted to remind everyone, of what I have already seen floating around the internet, but still important enough to remind.  Our next release of SRM is going to require a 64 bit OS.  This is the same as our next release of VC as it too will require a 64 bit host OS.  This change is required to support the increased capabilities of our products.  As we scale our products to match our customers needs, generally 1 – 2 years in advance of where they will need all the capabilities of a given product we have had to use a 64 bit OS.  This will show itself in increased numbers in things like more simultaneous vSphere client connections.”

To me these new operating system (OS) requirements mean we will see even more instances of vCenter as a VM (virtual machine). It only seems logical that a least path of resistance is to virtualize the management server in order to upgrade, especially considering all have already invested in 64 bit hardware for their hypervisors if they decided to upgrade to vSphere 4 in the first place. To go a step further, I’m willing to argue that it will be more common for an IT Department to justify the cost of additional ESX hosts, even if only dedicated for management, then it will to deploy new servers for physical instances of vCenter.

The looming transition to a console-less ESXi eventually means more management virtual appliances in the future too. Solutions which will continue to need a ESX console or similar will have to substitute their own appliance to operate with ESXi. This means even more justification for additional ESX/ESXi hosts and thus greases the decision to virtualize vCenter as well. I expect to see management clusters of ESX hosts become more common in the future than even the use of management networks today.

ESX hosts have bigger and badder hardware now than ever before allowing for higher consolidation ratios and larger applications to easily run in virtual machines, but it will be interesting to see if the vCenter as a VM best practices change over time. I personally feel that continuing to separate the database from the virtualized vCenter will continue to be a smart choice. Running a separate, and even virtualized, SQL instance ensures not only better performance of vCenter as a VM but enhances DR scenarios. In fact, those that already have the vCenter database on a remote instance will likely have a safer upgrade to the 64 bit vCenter.

The new 64 bit requirements will no doubt make for an interesting migration scenario, and I’m sure we will see some positive and negative opinions. Let me know your thoughts on a 64 bit vCenter as a VM in the future!

VMware made upgrading to vSphere 4 easy enough, but there are still a few things that can go wrong. One example is that admins must consider the patch and version levels of VirtualCenter and ESX  to begin. After the vCenter upgrade specific  compatibilities between vCenter 4 and ESX 3.x must be understood if a mixed mode environment will exist during the span of the upgrade.

vCenter 4 Pre-Upgrade Check

Although the Agent Pre-Upgrade Check Utility was introduced last Fall when VMware released vCenter 4 Update 1, I had not come across a situation where using the tool identified problems with ESX upgrades. Judging by several other blog posts that demonstrated the utility on the web already, most all of these bloggers showed “pass” scenarios as well. For me that was the same result until this week. In fact, the vCenter Pre-Upgrade Check proved it’s worth to me in a huge way.

For those not familiar how to use the Pre-Upgrade Utility, just start the autorun.exe in the vCenter 4 U1 .zip file or from the install DVD. At the bottom of the vCenter Installer menu is the option to start the pre-upgrade check. See the image to the right of this post.

Once the tool starts point it at the VirtualCenter 2.5 server. After less than 5 minutes

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I haven’t always covered all the vCenter, VirtualCenter, and ESX/ESXi updates in the past. Several updates have been released since the last time I did. VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6’s announcement caught my attention because of a fix to uploading files with the datastore browser. This issue has been reported in one of the longest comment threads here at VM /ETC. More on that later in this post, but I received the following email notification that VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 was released:

VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 is Generally Available

We are pleased to inform you that VMware VirtualCenter Server 2.5 Update 6 (English and localized) is generally available as of late night January 29, 2010.

VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 provides the following improvements:

• Guest Operating System Customization Improvements
• Support for Firefox 3.x Browsers with VirtualCenter Web Access
• Bug and security fixes

For details regarding the new fixes and improvements, please refer to the release notes.

VirtualCenter Server 2.5 Update 6 is available for download.

For details regarding compatibility, please view vSphere Compatibility Matrixes.

Thanks,
VMware Infrastructure Product Management Team

Some of the highlights for me when reading the Release Notes are:

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VMware has published a vSphere Pre-requisites Checklist PDF that will be very handy document to have when planning for the upgrade of a current VMware Infrastructure. The following is part of the document’s introduction and explains it’s purpose:

“This Pre-requisites Checklist is intended for those involved in planning, designing, and upgrading an existing VMware Infrastructure to VMware vSphere. The intended audience includes the roles listed below:

• Solution Architects responsible for driving architecture-level decisions
• Consultants, Partners, and IT personnel, who require knowledge for deploying and upgrading the vSphere infrastructure

it is assumed that they have knowledge and familiarity with VMware Infrastructure and have access to the VMware Infrastructure and VMware vSphere product documentation for reference.”

The document is considered a draft version, and will be updated when vSphere is generally available (GA) later this Quarter (Late May?). Even in it’s current state, the PDF walks administrators and architects through all possible planning and upgrade scenarios of both vCenter and ESX  hosts and points out a lot of the potential gotchas of a vSphere 4 migration.

I’m sure I will use this document regularly over then next 12 months. I might as well have it laminated once it’s finalized after GA!

updated 12.14.08 – VM /ETC was successfully updated to WordPress 2.7! If you notice anything stranger than normal or broken please leave me a comment or send me an email. Thanks, Rich

My Change Control Request to take VM /ETC down for maintenance on 12.13.08 (today) in order to upgrade to WordPress version 2.7 has been reluctantly approved by the Change Control Board. It was not an easy task convincing the Board to allow this upgrade. The Change Control Board is just me, of course!

VM /ETC will experience periods of temporary unavailability from 10 pm to 11 pm EST tonight. Thanks for your patience during this time period, and thanks for reading VM /ETC.

Some VM /ETC readers may remember a weekly series of posts I was doing earlier this year – “things that make you go hmmm“. Well, the August 12 ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 BUG definitely deserves a resurrection of that series and a post all to itself. Although this topic is still a little too sensitive to be humorous today, I’ve included a mix of comic and serious links. Hopefully we can all look back and at least chuckle about these events sometime in the future. So, here is a sampling of of the various reactions and opinions on the VMware time bomb bug from around the internet. Laugh if you can. After all, it’s Friday … Read the rest of this entry »

Being that it is the end of the week and I have fallen a day or so behind in keeping up with the VMware updates for the August 12 time bomb bug, I decided that I would post the remaining emails I received from VMware. I’m also including an update from John Troyer from the VMTN Blog providing some clarity on version number information differences between the install media and the express patched ESX/ESXi 3.5 versions. Read the rest of this entry »