By now the whole world has probably read that vSphere 4 Update 2 has been released. (release notes vCenter, release notes ESX, release notes ESXi ) Some of you might have even started slowly upgrading their test systems. (Like I am doing at the moment…)
I will not copy the full release notes but I do want to point out a couple of things on which I have been waiting for.
What’s Cool:
- vSphere 4.0 U2 includes an enhancement of the performance monitoring utility, resxtop. The resxtop utility now provides visibility into the performance of NFS datastores in that it displays the following statistics for NFS datastores: Reads/s, writes/s, MBreads/s, MBwrtn/s, cmds/s, GAVG/s (guest latency).
- VMware High Availability configuration might fail when advanced HA option das.allowNetwork uses vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) port group on an HA-enabled cluster, if you specify a vDS port group by using the advanced HA configuration option das.allowNetwork, the HA configuration on the hosts might fail. This issue is resolved in this release. Starting with this release, das.allowNetwork works with vDS.
- The esxtop and resxtop utilities do not display various logical cpu power state statistics; this issue is resolved in this release. A new Power screen is accessible with the esxtop utility (supported on ESX) and resxtop utility (supported on ESX and ESXi) that displays logical cpu statistics. To switch to the Power screen, press y at the esxtop or resxtop screens.
- 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. This issue is resolved in this release.
In this release many issues have been fixed, but also some new features have been added. For me personally the first one in the list is important. Up to ESX 4 Update 1 it was always needed to dive in to vscsiStats to see the Guest Latency for NFS based storage. As of Update 2 you can just run esxtop and check the statistics for your NFS datastore. This will definitely simplify troubleshooting, single pane of glass!