A lot of people have been asking for this: When will ESX 3.5 Update 3 be released? Well here’s your answer, download it now.

There are a couple of new things introduced:

• Increase in vCPU per Core Limit — The limit on vCPUs per core has been raised from 8 (or 11 for VDI workloads) to 20. This change only raises the supported limit but does not include any additional performance optimizations. Raising the limit allows users more flexibility to configure systems based on specific workloads and to get the most advantage from increasingly faster processors. The achievable number of vCPUs per core will depend on the workload and specifics of the hardware. It is expected that most deployments will remain within the previous range of 8-11 vCPUs per core. For more information, see VI3 Performance Best Practices and Benchmarking Guidelines.
• HP BL495c support — This release adds support for the HP Blade Server BL495c with all Virtual Connect and IO Options allowing 1 or 10Gb connection to the network (upstream) and 1Gb connections only to the servers (downstream).
• Newly Supported NICs —  This release adds support for the following NICs: 
  • Broadcom 5716 1Gb
  • Broadcom  57710 10Gb Adapters
  • Broadcom 57711 10Gb Adapters at 1Gb speed only

  Note: iSCSI/TOE hardware offloads available with these adapters are not supported by VMware with ESX 3.5.

• Newly Supported SATA Controllers— This release adds support for the following SATA controllers:
  • Broadcom HT1000 (supported in native SATA mode only with SATA hard drives and Solid State Disk devices)
  • Intel ICH-7 (supported in IDE/ATA mode only with SATA CD/DVD drives)

  Note: Storing VMFS data stores on drives connected to these controllers is not supported

• Newly Supported Guest Operating Systems — Support for the following Guest Operating Systems have been added by VMware during the ESX 3.5 Update 3 release cycle:
  • Solaris 10 U5
  • Ubuntu 8.04.1
  • RHEL 4.7
• Internal SAS networked storage controllers — This release adds experimental support for Intel Modular Server MFSYS25 SAS Storage Control Modules (SCMs). For known issues with this platforms and workaround see SAS Link and Port Failovers with the Intel Modular Server Running Update 3 and Later Versions of ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 (KB 1007394).
• Interrupt Coalescing (IC) for Qlogic 4Gb FC HBAs — Introduced in this release, the feature reduces CPU utilization (and CPU cost per IO) and improves throughput of IO intensive workloads by generating a single interrupt for a burst of Fibre Channel frames, when received in a short period of time, rather than interrupting the CPU each time a frame is received. The feature is enabled by default.
• Experimental Support for the VMDK Recovery Tool — This release adds support for the VMDK Recovery tool, a script intended to help customers to recover VMFS/vmdk data stores from accidental deletion of VMFS/vmdk data store or physical disk corruption. For more information, see VMDK Recovery Tool (ESX 3.5 Update 3) ( KB 1007243).
• Small Footprint CIM Broker —  Updated SFCB to version 1.3.0
• IBM SAN Volume Controller — SVC is now supported with Fixed Multipathing Policy as well as MRU Multipathing Policy.

I think the most exciting thing is the VMDK Recovery Tool! If I can find the time I will definitely test it!

So you can easily add users with useradd command we talked about. But there’s still a problem, you can’t add user-roles to the user you’re creating. You still need the VirtualCenter client to do that. My colleague Horst Mundt read my post and was so kind to email me a powershell script he created that can add roles to specific users or groups for you:

$VCimpl = Get-VIServer -Server 192.168.116.201 -User root -Password <...>
# Note: Server is an ESX host, not VC
# Force load
[Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("vmware.vim")

# Edit hostname below
$hostname = "esx302.hm.local" 

# The name of the role to be assigned
$roleLabel="Read-Only"
#$roleLabel="Administrator"

#The name of the principal (user or group) that the role is assigned to
$principal="GroupX"

# set to false if principal is a user , not a group
$principalIsGroup = $true

$propagateToSubEntities = $true

$svcRef = new-object VMware.Vim.ManagedObjectReference
$svcRef.Type = "ServiceInstance"
$svcRef.Value = "ServiceInstance"
$serviceInstance = get-view $svcRef

$authMgr = Get-View $serviceInstance.Content.AuthorizationManager
$hahost = Get-View (Get-VMhost -Name $hostname).ID
$compResource = $hahost.Parent
$oldperms = $authMgr.retrieveEntityPermissions($hahost.MoRef, $true)
$roles = $authMgr.roleList
$roleid = 0
$found = $false
for ($i = 0 ; $i -lt $roles.Length ; $i++)
{
      $role=$roles[$i]
      if ($role.Info.Label -eq $roleLabel)
      {
            $roleid = $role.RoleId
            $found = $true
      }
}
if ( $found -eq $false )
{
      echo ("Role not found: " + $roleLabel )
      exit 1
}

$permission = New-Object Vmware.Vim.Permission
$permission.group = $principalIsGroup
$permission.principal = $principal
$permission.propagate = $propagateToSubEntities
$permission.roleID = $roleid
$authmgr.SetEntityPermissions($compResource, @($permission))

The script has been tested on ESX 3.0.2. I did not have the opportunity to test it myself by the way… So if anyone can test it against ESX 3.5 and let’s us know what the results are!

A few weeks ago I posted a document which contains valuable information on implementing VMware HA. I just received an update on this document and uploaded it. I’ve also changed the link in the original post.

As most of you know I work for VMware which means I receive a huge amount of email and documents with excellent technical info. Some I can’t blog about but some I can. Last week I received this VMware HA implementations notes document by Seva Semouchin. Seva is a Technical Account Manager based in Germany!

This document deals about VMware HA clusters and all the advanced options you have with the use cases for these options. And that’s what makes this document very useful, the use cases! So everyone dealing with HA clusters should definitely read this document. Thanks Seva for letting me distribute it, and thanks for a great document!

How cool is this video about Distributed Power Management, it demonstrates how DPM works and what the possible utility savings could be. Just watch it:

I’m really looking forward to the podcast tonight. We’ve got Chad Sakac from EMC joining in to elaborate on topics like:

• What VMware, EMC and Cisco are doing together around the Next Generation Datacenter
• What’s coming in vStorage
• Reference Architectures for Tier 1 applications like Exchange, SQL Server, Sharepoint
• What we’re seeing around Disaster Recovery for VMware

There has been a lot of discussion(check Scott’s take on this) around this advanced NFS setting called “NFS.LockDisable”. In short, you can disable the locking mechanism on NFS volumes with this setting.

In the past NetApp had a best practices document which stated that it should be disabled by setting it to “1″. But, as some noticed this can and probably will result in corrupt file-systems. So this “best practice” mysteriously disappeared from the NetApp VI3 Best Practices guide and a KB Article with the VMware best practice on this setting popped up.

So if you did set “NFS.LockDisable” to 1 please change it back to “0″.  

It might be beneficial to also implement the ”prefvmx.ConsolidateDeleteNFSLocks” that Scott discussed along with patch ESX350-200808401-BG. This setting is to avoid long delays when deleting ESX snapshots. This can take up to 30 seconds, which is quite long compared to iSCSI or FC. So you should only implement this fix if you run NFS and do VMware snapshots at them same time and are experiencing these dalays.

I do recommend that everyone with an NFS filer takes a look at the NetApp best practices document because it does contain valuable information, but before you apply it besure that it doesn’t conflict with a VMware best practice!

VMware just changed their VCB multipathing support. Before the KB article stated “Powerpath and other multipathing software.” The KB article has been changed and contains specific version of Powerpath which are officially supported and the “other multipathing” has been removed. Still I’m no fan of multipathing software on the VCB host, I would prefer using 1 HBA for uploading to a holding tank and 1 HBA for downloading the images from the SAN.