Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

ESX

New patches for 3.0.x

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There are a bunch of new patches released for 3.0.x:

New patches are available for ESX Server 3.0.1 and ESX Server 3.0.2. Please follow the instructions on the appropriate patch download page.

VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 Patch Download Page
[http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches_301.html]

ESX-1003504 (General): Fix for mptscsi_2xx Driver
ESX-1003505 (General): Fixes Network Connectivity Issues with Intel e1000 Driver
ESX-1003506 (General): Virtual Machines Boot Failure Through Network for PXE Clients
ESX-1003507 (Critical): Fixes Packet Latency and tg3 Driver Issues
ESX-1003355 (General): I/O Transactions on SUN X4200 Servers Cause SCSI Timeouts
ESX-1003508 (General): Fixes for VirtualCenter Server Agent Crash, Hot Addition and Deletion of LUNs Failure, Deletion of Virtual Machine Level Permissions; Support for VirtualCenter 2.0.x to Read Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 License Files
ESX-1003509 (General): Fixes for RARP Broadcast With NICs Failover and Hot Addition / Deletion of LUNs Failure

VMware ESX Server 3.0.2 Patch Download Page
[http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches_302.html]

ESX-1003513 (General): Fixes for Vmotion and Clone Operations Failure, VirtualCenter Server Agent Crash, Hot Addition and Deletion of LUNs Failure, Virtual Machine Level Permissions; VirtualCenter 2.0.x Failure to Read VI 3.5 License Files
ESX-1003177 (General): I/O Transactions on SUN X4200 Servers Cause SCSI Timeouts
ESX-1003514 (Critical): Fixes Packet Latency and tg3 Driver Issues
ESX-1003515 (Critical): Support for VMotion Incompatibility, Network Connectivity Issues; Fixes for Hot Addition and Deletion of LUNs Failure, Virtual Machines Boot Failure Through Network for PXE Clients, RARP Broadcast With NICs Failover

We expect the next patch release in late March 2008. If you have any questions, please contact support at 877-4-VMWARE.

Fiber channel round-robin load balancing

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There’s a nice article about “round-robin” load balancing on SystemsArchitech which got me a bit dazzled about this new functionality:

esxcfg-mpath – lun <*.lun> —policy custom –H minq –T any –C 0 –B 2048
The policy states that the LUN should utilize a custom policy that determines which (of two) HBA to utilize based on the minimum queue length. This HBA selection is triggered every 2048 blocks transmitted to a given LUN over the same target. The policy will use any targets available to either of the two HBAs. In using storage that manages host port load-balancing, LUNs will only have two paths (one per fabric) and the storage array will perform storage array host port balancing from within its own management. With other storage arrays it is typical to perform this host port balancing from the hosts accessing the given storage array.

With 10 ESX hosts set with this policy wouldn’t it probably cause path thrashing on an active/active SAN? You never know which controller will access a specific LUN and if your unlucky it will be switching from controller A to controller B every millisecond. Anyone else any thoughts on this new feature and the possible danger?

What’s New in VMware Infrastructure 3: Performance Enhancements

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There’s a new PDF about performance enhancements in ESX 3.5:

The new features in VMware® Infrastructure 3 makes it even easier for organizations to virtualize their most demanding and intense workloads. The new version of VMware Infrastructure 3 provides significant performance enhancements, including the release of VMware ESX Server 3.5 and a new ultra-thin hypervisor called VMware ESX Server 3i that can significantly.

Download:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vi3_performance_enhancements_wp.pdf

esx-autopatch.pl

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For all those not using the VirtualCenter Update Manager, Dominic uploaded an update on his esx-autopatch.pl script. You can now also patch 3.5 hosts with this script, which can come in handy for scripted installs!

vmkping results in “syscall version mismatch (compiled: 0x7616c4e3, kernel: 0x50f63116)”

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When troubleshooting a VMotion problem on an unpatched ESX 3.0.2 update 1 host today I wanted to use vmkping. This constantly resulted in the following error message:

syscall version mismatch (compiled: 0x7616c4e3, kernel: 0x50f63116)

I did not find any useful info on google so I checked the VMware knowledge base, maybe some over at VMware can read my mind or it’s a pure coincidence they just updated the following KB article, it seems to be a bug which is fixed in ESX-1002424. It’s actually mentioned in the release notes… I should read those more often I guess.