While the Dutch and UK bloggers sleep, VMware has released Update 1 for ESXi 4, ESX 4, and vCenter 4.
Notable improvements include:
- View 4 support
- Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 support (Support for Windows 7 was timed nicely for View 4)
- DB2 database back end support (Who requested this? Sound off, I’d like to hear your comments)
- HA cluster hosts can now support 160 VMs each in a cluster of 8 hosts or less. 9 or more hosts in an HA cluster are still limited to 40 VMs per host (This still bugs me a little. Anyone loading up a host with near 160 or more VMs?)
- Paravirtualized SCSI support has been extended to Windows 2003 and 2008 boot drives
- vDS performance improvement (Important if creating VMkernel portgroups on vDS for NAS storage)
- vCPUs per core limit increased from 20 to 25 (“Lorraine – You are my density…”)
- Intel Xeon 3400 series CPU support
- Improved support for Microsoft Clustering (Yes, more changes to the wonderful MS clustering document)
- Rumors of comma separators in report/graph numbers (This could be my favorite new feature)
- Many resolved issues
Last but not least, we can still reboot our ESX 4 hosts with CTRL + ALT + DEL at the console š
“DB2 database back end support (Who requested this? Sound off, Iād like to hear your comments)”
Yeah, I would have thought MySQL and PostgreSQL support would have been more useful.
These changes are going to affect maximum configuration PDF. Does this impact vcp4.0 exam? Probably a question for forum but in case you know in advance.
Thank you
I think more people wanted mysql support than DB2, i am at least one of them.
And the CTRL-ALT-DEL is a default redhat config, and easy to fix:
perl -p -i.old -e “s/ca:12345:ctrlaltdel/#ca:12345:ctrlaltdel/g” /etc/inittab
init q
What’s with the BTTF reference? I.. don’t get it! š
Jason,
especially the support for boot drives with pvSCSI driver is great, since this should boost the performances quite a bit….-:)
Since I was out yesterday, I was a little surprised to see an email from our vCenter listing 41 patches were downloaded early this morning. It appears only 1 of them is critical for ESX and 4 critical for ESXi.
I was hoping vCenter Server would support WS2008 R2 with this update. It appears it doesn’t. I also noticed that WS2008 SP2 is now officially supported and wasn’t before. I guess I presumed it was supported before.
Do I need to install prior patches before running Update 1?
@Dan – It was the first thing that popped in my head when I was thinking about the increase in vCPU to core density.
It bothers you that they keep increasing the maximum amount of VMs you can have on a host? It bothers me that they can increase that one, but can’t increase the max of 40 when using an HA cluster with 9 or most hosts. This screams like a false limitation to make us buy more servers. Does anyone know why this limitation still exists? I mean, what’s up with the HA algorithm that it drops so drastically when you add that 9th host? Without seeing that info, it is hard to believe it isn’t an artificial limit….