When I added an extra SCSI card to my ESX 3.5 test system I could not get it to reconnect again with VirtualCenter. After a close inspection I noticed that vmnic0 did not exist anymore(esxcfg-nics -l), it got renamed to vmnic1. Because of that my vSwitch0 did not have a NIC linked to it anymore. I linked the new vmnic1 to my vSwitch0(esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch0 -L vmnic1) and everything was up and running again. I’m glad this didn’t happen in a production environment with several vSwitches and portgroups, than again it is possible to rename them again by manually editing the /etc/vmware/esx.conf file. There’s a knowledge base article on this behavior on the VMware support site, I noticed it a couple of weeks ago an now I witnessed it. Definitely not the first place I would normally look. I hope VMware can fix this glitch, although I can fully understand why this happens.
VMware
New ESX 3i download
I just noticed that VMware released a new version of ESX 3i on the 10th of January. The current build number is “70348” and the previous was “67921”. It’s just a minor update:
EULA Update—The reissued version of ESX Server 3i Installable incorporates an updated, corrected version of the EULA.
Licensing Fix—The reissued version of ESX Server 3i Installable lets you apply appropriate host-based licenses to servers that have more than two CPUs.
Support on ESX 3i and HA
I never noticed this, but during the configuration of HA in my testlab I received some weird errors. I just could not enable it on the ESX Server that ran ESX 3i, and I’m pretty sure DNS works fine. Today I received an email about 3i and support on HA, which states:
Support for VMware High Availability (HA) is experimental and expected to be fully supported in an upcoming patch or update.
You can read more about it in this PDF about 3i and HA. But is it me or is almost every single interesting new feature experimental. I hope that VMware will support all the new features when the patches/updates are released
VMware buys Thinstall…
Damn what a surprise this is… I never expected that VMware would buy Thinstall. But it seems they’re really going to compete with Microsoft(Softgrid) and Citrix(Presentation Server). I do believe that Thinstall is one of the most promising Application Virtualization tools around. I’ve seen a couple of demos by my colleague Edwin Friesen of Thinstallguru.com and was amazed by the simplicity and effectiveness.
With VDI, the range of Virtual Appliances and Thinstall VMware is definitely on for the challenge. After the speculation of Virtualization.info I dug into Fastscale and it wouldn’t surprise me if they are next on the list.
New VCB features
When exploring VCB 1.1 I noticed some new features. One of the most prominent is the option to run VCB from within a VM. I can hear most of you think what’s the point of that and how about that HBA / iSCSI connection you need. Well if it’s of any use I will leave in the middle because I don’t see any reason for virtualizing VCB for larger environments. But for small environments, which don’t have shared storage this can be an easy way to dump their data without resorting to unsupported scripts. VCB is easily setup via the executable, next next finish. [Read more…] about New VCB features