Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

3.0.x

New version of ESX 3.5 and patches for 3.0.x

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VMware just released a new version of the ESX 3.5 ISO according to their download site. The release notes haven’t been update yet so unfortunately I can’t tell you what’s included, but my guess would be the patches released on the 17th of January.

Latest Released Version: 3.5.0 | 02/20/08 | 64607 | 565 MB

There are no new patches available for 3.5 at the moment, but they did patch 3.0.x and the following is fixed in these patches(8 patches for 3.0.2, over 140MB):

  • Security Update to the Samba Package
  • Security Updates to the Python Package
  • Fix for aacraid SCSI Driver Security Issue
  • Virtual Machines on the ESX Server host do not power ON automatically
  • ESX Server host might stop responding when a CD-ROM drive is accessed
  • iSCSI LUNs in the pass-through mode might cause the ESX Server host to stop responding
  • Fixes for Remote-Console Black-out, OpenSolaris Boot Delay, Duplicate Packet Issue; Support for Virtual Machines to Share Generic SCSI Devices
  • Fixes for VMware Tools Installer

By the way I signed in on the patch/updates email and haven’t received anything yet… Did any of you guys receive anything?

ESX 3.5 and weird DRS/HA behaviour…

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During the last couple of ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5 implementations I encountered some weird DRS/HA behavior:

  1. During the reboot of a VM ESX decided to vmotion the VM, as you can imagine this took a lot longer than normal due to the memory being excessively active.
  2. When the DRS Affinity Rules in a two cluster node is set to “seperate” two specific virtual machines VMware has a hard time relocating a VM when a host goes into “maintenance mode”. I can imagine why this happens but it’s definitely not something that’s suppose to happen in my opinion. It’s a Admin initiated manual action it should overrule all affinity settings.

So let me hear which weird behavior you noticed with ESX 3.5 / VC 2.5….

VirtualCenter 2.0.2 Update 3

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VMware just announced VirtualCenter 2.0.2 update 3:

Resolved Issues include:
Virtual Machine Management Issues
PR:219126 – Virtual Machine Alarms Not Triggered This release fixes an issue where VirtualCenter alarms are not triggered when the alarm conditions are met.

PR:225357 – Host and Virtual Machine Alarms Stop Updating Over Time This release fixes an issue where some alarms that are configured for a virtual machine can fail to update. This issue is usually encountered after the virtual machine has changed power state.

PR:163019 – Virtual Machines Do Not Show Correct Status This release fixes an issue where the status indicators of some virtual machines do not accurately reflect the virtual machine’s status. This issue usually occurs after a restart of the VirtualCenter Server.

Licensing Issues
R:229629 – VirtualCenter Does Not Correctly Display New License Format This release fixes an issue where earlier versions of VirtualCenter are not able display licenses from license files issued since the release of VirtualCenter 2.5. On versions of VirtualCenter before 2.0.2 Update 3, the license files appear to install normally but log warnings such as “Chunk ‘desc=ESX Server Enterprise’ was not well formed, skipping” in the log files when license files of the new format are displayed in VirtualCenter.

The release notes aren’t online yet, so we will have to wait for a more detailed view on what has changed in this release.

Issue with performance stats in VirtualCenter?

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I noticed at a few customer sites that the Performance tab of VirtualCenter was getting sluggish but never got the chance to really pinpoint the problem. A couple of days ago user “jterpstr” posted about this on the VMTN forum and it seems that the old rows aren’t deleted from the database for some reason. The table grows to an enormous amount of rows which causes some queries to become unresponsive or very very slow. For more info and a possible solution keep track of this topic om the forum. Thanks to the guys in this thread for pinpointing the problem and narrowing it down to a possible cause.

Installing VirtualCenter 2.0.2 on a Windows 2000 SP4 server

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Today I encountered a weird problem. When I started the installation of VirtualCenter 2.0.2 on a Windows 2000 Server I received the following error notification:”Setup cannot continue. The “VMware VirtualCenter Server 2.0″ requires Update 1 Rollup for Windows 2000 SP4. Please see KB article 816542 at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816542/.”

I checked the server but the patch was installed, so I rebooted the machine to be sure the installation of the update was completed but no luck. I reinstalled the patched and tried to install VC but again no luck. Next thing to do was check the VMTN forum and luckily someone already encountered the same weird problem and they received the following fix from VMware support:

************ Problem ***********
Update from VC 2.0.0 to VC 2.0.1 not possible.
Error message that “Update Rollup 1” is not installed.

************ Root Cause (if known) ***********
Wrong registry check of installer.

************ Solution ***********
Replace NTDLL.DLL by KERNEL32.DLL in the registry:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Updates\Windows 2000\SP5\Update Rollup 1\Filelist\0]
“FileName”=”NTDLL.DLL”
“Version”=”5.0.2195.7006”
“BuildDate”=”Thu Jan 13 10:09:36 2005”
“BuildCheckSum”=”77ecb”
“Location”=”C:
WINNT
system32”