Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

VMware

Patches for 3.0.1 and 3.0.2…

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I just received the following:

New patches are available for ESX Server 3.0.1 and ESX Server 3.0.2.

ESX Server patches can be accessed through the on-line ESX Server Patch Download tool:
[http://app.connect.vmware.com/e/er.aspx?s=524&lid=2272&elq=4D5713F997F04342981A231DF09609D0“>]

Please follow the instructions on the appropriate patch download page.

VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 Patches

ESX-1003516 (Critical): fixes an issue where snapshot of a Suspended Virtual Machine fails;includes a fix for Windows OEM CDs Installation Failure; fixes an issue where Virtual Machines stop responding When Updated with Symantec Virus Definition
ESX-1003517 (Security):updates the e2fsprogs package
ESX-1003518 (Critical):changes the default Multipath Policy;fixes an issue where ESX Server stops responding due to low COW Heap Memory;fixes an issue where ESX Server hosts stop responding due to a spinlock timeout;includes fixes for SysAlert Warning Message, Partially Disabled Processors
ESX-1003520 (General):fixes an issue with the USB Subsystem and High-Speed USB HID Devices
ESX-1003521 (Security):Updates the libxml2 Utility

VMware ESX Server 3.0.2 Patches

ESX-1003523 (Security):updates the e2fsprogs package
ESX-1003524 (Critical):updates VMware-esx-vmkernel, VMware-esx-vmx, and VMware-esx-apps
ESX-1003526 (General):fixes an issue with USB Subsystem and High-Speed USB HID
ESX-1003527 (General):adds support for Ubuntu 7.10 GA
ESX-1003528 (Security):updates the libxml2 Utility

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

Performance stats gone

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Clint discovered the following:

Source –
Ran into a problem while doing some performance testing on some test VMs. We found that we had no historical performance data for the VM or Host. All we had was real time data. This can be a major issue, especially when you are trying to troubleshoot or like in this case get performance data for a performance test! My co-worker did some research and found that we are not an isolated event. This is a bug in VC 2.5.

The Fix

We found a few references to doing a “repair” install of VC 2.5. So we went ahead and tried it and it worked. We also found references to the performance data getting corrupted. In that case they had to restore the database to a prior dataset and re-install the VC.

I’ve seen the same at several customer sites and indeed the fix that Clint describes, repair of VirtualCenter, works.

Weird scripted install problems

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Today I was testing a scripted installation for a customer. All day long I had weird problems with the script. But whenever I reviewed my script their seemed to be nothing wrong with it. I wrote the scripts with Notepad++ and double checked them with vi and nano. You can imagine I almost threw my laptop out the window of sheer frustration. Notepad++ has a function called “convert to unix format” and although I could not find any weird characters, returns of whatsoever… it did solve my problem. After having a closer look at Notepad++ it seems like there’s a setting to avoid this behaviour:

I should have known it isn’t a good idea to edit linux script files on a Windows host, if only VMware would release a linux version of the VirtualCenter client…

Support for Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) in 3.5 update !

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I received an email stating the following:

Microsoft Cluster Server is supported with VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1. Support is similar to ESX 3.0.1 with the following additions:

  • Both 64 bit and 32 bit Windows 2003 guests are supported with MSCS.
  • Boot from SAN for VMs using MSCS is now supported.
  • Majority Node Set clusters with application-level replication (for example, Microsoft Exchange 2007 Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR)) is now supported.

For details regarding MSCS support, including a number of important restrictions, please see the document “Setup for Microsoft Cluster Service.” For information concerning supported storage arrays, refer to the Storage/SAN Compatibility Guide for ESX Server 3.5 and ESX Server 3i.