Today I encountered a weird phenomenon which I did not encounter yet. I installed the VMware Converter Plugin for VirtualCenter client, so far so good. Only thing left to do was to tick the checkbox to enable the plugin. But as soon as I ticked it the VirtualCenter client crashed without any warning. I rebooted the server, and tried it again… without any luck unfortunately. I reinstalled the plugin, again no luck… I checked the wonderful VMTN forum and someone already solved this problem, it’s due to the “ssleay32.dll” in the system32 directory which is incompatible with the one VMware converter uses. Remove it, and everything will work like it should! If this doesn’t work, check out this follow-up.
VDI / VCM with ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5
Try it out:
Get a free 60-day evaluation of VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), an end-to end solution for virtual desktop management that gives you the ability to deliver desktops from the data center for greater control and flexibility. With VMware VDI, you get the proven VMware Infrastructure 3 software along with VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM), an enterprise-class connection broker that connects remote users to centralized desktops and manages VDI environments. Learn more about VMware VDI.
YOUR TRIAL INCLUDES
- VMware Infrastructure 3:
- VMware ESX Server 3.5
- VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 (including VMware VMotion, VMware DRS and VMware HA)
- VMware Consolidated Backup
- VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 2
New HA error messages
Just noticed the new errors HA produces at the console when a host is isolated in ESX 3.5:
Node isolated from network. Either repair network or override agent startup using option -noiso
And when the host returns from isolation:
Node no longer isolated, will restart
This makes troubleshooting a lot easier! Thanks VMware 🙂
Citrix Xenserver 4.1 Beta
Thincomputing.net just posted about a new Xenserver Beta. Looking at the new features list it seems things are finally getting up to speed, especially “bonding of NIC’s” is a must have in a enterprise environment. Hope you can also pin the live migration on a specific NIC in this release, but looking at the specs I don’t think it’s possible.
Citrix is pleased to introduce the public beta release of Citrix XenServer 4.1.Citrix XenServer 4.1 is a service pack that enhances the previous v4 release. New capabilities and improvements include:
- Scalability and Performance
- Increased number of simultaneous running VMs
- Enhanced nested page table (NPT) support for modern AMD processors
- VLAN support in Standard Edition
- Improved Citrix Presentation Server performance and maximum number of user sessions
- Reliability and Manageability
- Host NIC bonding for fail-over (configured via CLI)
- Centralized logging
- Configuration of network management interfaces via the CLI
- Update/patch management integrated in XenCenter
- Java bindings for XenAPI in SDK
- Storage
- Initial shared fibre channel storage support (via CLI only)
- Enhanced support for NetApp filers, including snapshot and cloning
- Windows guest Hot disk remove
- ISCSI improvements
- Support for hot-plugging USB storage as a storage repository
- Host System
- Rolling pool upgrade support
- NIC driver updates (e1000, BNX2, TG3)
- Support several 10Gb network adapters (Mellanox/Chelsio)
- Improved hardware support
- Guest Support
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 32-bit and CentOS 5 32-bit install from physical CD
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 x64 and CentOS 5 x64 guest support
- Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 x86 and x64 guest support
- Windows Vista x86 guest support
Queue depth and alike settings lost after an upgrade to ESX 3.5
I just had a discussion about an upgrade from 3.0.x to 3.5. During that conversation the new HBA drivers that VMware uses came up. After an upgrade it seems that the queue depth settings are lost. Thinking about it I can understand why. ESX 3.5 uses different driver for most HBA’s. For instance Emulex, their driver for the LP11002 used to be the “lpfcdd_732” and now is the “lpfc_740”. After an upgrade the new driver/module doesn’t get the options you provided with “esxcfg-module” because it was specified for that specific “old” module. This means that you have to set these options again!