VMware just released ESX 4.0 Update 1 and vCenter 4.0 Update 1. Most people have already reported on this by now. Two things that stood out for me personally is the following:
- HA Cluster Configuration Maximum — HA clusters can now support 160 virtual machines per host in HA Cluster of 8 hosts or less. The maximum number of virtual machines per host in cluster sizes of 9 hosts and above is still 40, allowing a maximum of 1280 Virtual Machines per HA cluster.
- Enhanced Clustering Support for Microsoft Windows – Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) for Windows 2000 and 2003 and Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering is now supported on an VMware High Availability (HA) and Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS) cluster in a limited configuration. HA and DRS functionality can be effectively disabled for individual MSCS virtual machines as opposed to disabling HA and DRS on the entire ESX/ESXi host. Refer to the Setup for Failover Clustering and Microsoft Cluster Service guide for additional configuration guidelines.
Especially the first is important as many people have been building non DRS-HA clusters solely for MSCS VMs. As of now this is not needed anymore. You can simply disable DRS and HA via the Cluster properties to make sure your MSCS VMs do not move around. I think Update 1 is an important release for everyone running vSphere at this moment.
Of course you View guys were all waiting for Update 1 to drop:
- VMware View 4.0 support – This release adds support for VMware View 4.0, a solution built specifically for delivering desktops as a managed service from the protocol to the platform.
Full ESX 4.0 U1 Release Notes
Full vCenter 4.0 U1 Release Notes
Something else I noticed… The release notes for ESX talk about “vMotion” where the release notes for vCenter talk about “VMotion”. It seems that VMotion is about to be renamed to vMotion.
Hi Duncan,
Concerning the disabling HA/DRS for individual VMs, isn’t this already possible per cluster by setting the Virtual Machine Options to “disabled”?
This is how I excluded the Exchange 2010 mailbox servers which fail on a VMotion while the rest of the cluster still uses DRS/HA. Or is this an unsupported configuration?
Kenneth
Although it is possible it was not supported before U1, with U1 it is.
Hi,
is there around documents/kb for each version that describes in an overview what is supported and what not. Everytime when it will be interesting using possibilities, I got an answer from the support this is not supported right by now, but you can configure it.
Many thanks for your help.
Best regards
Euuh, the documentation actually describes what is supported and what isn’t 🙂
This is great news for my team. We will be standing up a new production platform in 1Q of 2010 and up to this point have been planning to build two clusters because of MSCS.
Now we get the simplicity of building one and with DRS we will more effectively use all hosts, saving cost on scaling.
Why it may not have been supported, it works. I run ESX 3.5 U4 and have a few MSCS clusters. I find it silly that VM says to disable DRS/HA so I don’t. DRS/HA rules work just fine. The only gotcha that I have run into is that when an MSCS cluster node is powered off, sometimes DRS will do a Vmotion of the running node to balance everything out. Unless VM has added something to explicitly tag something as an MSCS cluster, I don’t forsee this behavior changing.
I know it works, tested and tried it many times. But i would never recommend a customer to run an unsupported config.
What I’m wondering is if Exchange 2010 is supported officially by MS to be run on vSphere 4 (or above)
I really don’t see the point in having MSCS nodes in VMware Cluster. Because VMotion, and therefore DRS, are not supported for MSCS nodes it really gums up the works when trying to get VUM to automate the process of patching your VMware Cluster. Enabling HA would be tempting, but then it will not ensure that the the MSCS nodes on the failed host don’t get powered up on the same host as the other MSCS node, and then VMotion/DRS are not supported.
Or am I missing something?
For now we are keeping MSCS workload on separate ESXi hosts that are set aside exclusively for MSCS virtual machines.
Keep in mind “AENAGY” that not every company can afford to create a dedicated cluster for that purpose.
Hi Duncan,
I’ve a request on the maximum datacenter to be able to create by vCenter 4.0 U1 and i don’t find any information on it (or i must change my eyes) ! 🙁
thank’s
Cyrille