Quite a few updates from VMware incl. vSphere 4.0 Update 1 and View 4.0

View 4 available for download among other updates…

The long awaited View 4 is available for download. The earlier version did not support vSphere 4.0 and this new version of View 4 does. It requires VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 which also now is available.

So for all that was running View 3.1 in Proof of Concept which required VI 3.5, it would now be possible to upgrade your VMware platform with both vSphere 4.0 Update 1 – which also got released this week.

So there have been quite a few updates from VMware this week:

VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 available for both ESX and vCenter
http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_vc40_u1_rel_notes.html
http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esx40_u1_rel_notes.html
http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esxi40_u1_rel_notes.html

VMware Data Recovery 1.1 available:
http://www.vmware.com/support/vdr/doc/vdr_110_releasenotes.html

VMware vSphere PowerCLI 4.0 Update 1 available:
http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/windowstoolkit/wintk40u1/windowstoolkit40U1-200911-releasenotes.html

VMware vSphere CLI 4.0 Update 1 available:
http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vcli/vcli401/vcli_401_relnotes.html

VMware View 4.0 available:
http://www.vmware.com/support/view40/doc/releasenotes_viewmanager40.html

VMware ThinApp 4.0.4 available:
http://www.vmware.com/support/thinapp4/doc/releasenotes_thinapp404.html

I linked to the release notes, because remember that it is important to READ them before using the software.

My Company, BusinessMann A/S won VMware Partner of the Year 2009 award in Denmark

I attended a local party held by Arrow ECS in Copenhagen last night, and several awards were given out during the party.

One award stood out to me, of course, which this blog post is about.

My company was nominated in the category of VMware Partner of the Year in Denmark with 3 other of our competitors.

The happy news was that BusinessMann A/S won the VMware Partner of the Year 2009 award, which makes me really proud.

First of all, thanks to VMware for giving BusinessMann A/S this award and thanks to all my collogues for the hard work in 2009.

Also thanks to Arrow ECS for a great party

VMware announces VMware View 4

VMware has today announced the new VMware View 4 platform for virtualizing desktops on their own VMware vSphere platform. So yes, VMware View 4 has support for VMware vSphere 4.0. It is built and tested on the latest VMware vSphere 4.0 releases

It has been a while since VMware announced the partnership with Teradici to use their PCoIP protocol within VMware View for improved user multimedia experience. This is a huge upgrade from the current RDP protocol, which VMware used in prior versions of View

I have watched a few demo’s of Teradici’s PCoIP protocol and has been pretty impressed with those

An overview of the VMware View Architecture:

VMware View will be GA on 19th of November 2009 and 60 days evaluation will be available for downloads.

Read more or register for an evaluation on VMware View 4here and you will receive an email when VMware View 4 is ready for download

VMs NIC disconnects after a VMotion

I had a customer calling me the other day about a weird problem. Some VMs disconnected their NIC after a VMotion.

It was not possible to connect the NIC back on a again

The customer was in the process of upgrading to vSphere, so used DRS/VMotion to put ESX hosts in maintenance mode, so they could be upgraded.

After looking in log files, we saw the following errors:

————Edited/output ————

6 10:19:21 esx1 vmkernel: 0:20:07:45.197 cpu3:6256)Net: 1317: can’t connect device: LAN: Out of resources
6 10:24:03 esx1 vmkernel: 0:20:12:27.267 cpu3:6256)Net: 1317: can’t connect device: LAN: Out of resources
——————————————-

This led us to check for how many ports the vSwitch was configured to use:
esxcfg-vswitch -l

————Edited/output ————

[root@esx1 ~]# esxcfg-vswitch -l

Switch Name   Num Ports    Used Ports   Configured Ports   MTU    Uplinks
vSwitch0          32                32                32                          1500   vmnic0

PortGroup Name   VLAN ID    Used Ports   Uplinks
LAN                       0               29                vmnic0
Service Console    0               1                  vmnic0
——————————————-

As we can see they have a LAN portgroup connected on vSwitch0 together with the Service Console. The default vSwitch is configured with 32 ports and due to the maintenance mode of one ESX hosts, this customer ran into the problem that the vSwitch didn’t have enough available ports for the VMs that were migrated to that specific host.

It resulted in that the NIC in the VM got disconnected and that we couldn’t reconnect it.

Any additionally created vSwitches is per default created with 64 ports.

So this leads me to the point. First, this is a design issue and should never happen if designed accordingly, however I do think that the DRS/VMotion feature should come up with a warning if a vSwitch is full, instead of migrating (VMotion) the VM and disconnect the VMs NIC interface.

This setup would also provide problems in a VMware HA scenario, if no available ports is free, then it would also leads to disconnected NICs in the VMs restarting.

Make sure that if you use vSwitch0 for VM connectivity to raise the number of ports from default of 32 ports to whatever is needed.