A Week With Virtual Infrastructure 3.5

I upgraded some of my virtual infrastructure to VirtualCenter 2.5 and ESX 3.5 on December 31st, 2007. It is five days later, and this is what I’ve noticed so far:

• The Virtual Infrastructure Client 2.5 is kinda slow. It reminds me of the early 2.0 clients, which got speedier with each update.
• I’ve used Storage VMotion a lot, with great success. Very cool feature, and really the reason I upgraded this soon. My storage guys need to get rid of an array I was sitting on, and instead of coordinating a big move it was just easier to do this.
• The upgrade process changed the resource limits for many of my VMs, to custom values which were just wrong. This seems to have only affected VMs that were upgraded via VMotion from an ESX 3.0 to 3.5 host, and it only seems to be a problem for my oldest VMs. If you are upgrading your environment, or have upgraded anything, double-check your per-VM resource limits.
• VirtualCenter gives me a lot of “The attempted operation cannot be performed in the current state” when I attempt to modify the resource limits of a VM. But then it actually sets the options. Hmmm.
• The biggest question I’ve been getting about the Virtual Infrastructure Client has been “how do I shut off all those Getting Started tabs?” Answer: Edit menu, Client Settings, “Remove all tabs” button.
• The feature to automatically keep the VMware Tools updated is cool, but I wish the Linux version of the tools would reboot afterwards to restore network connectivity, just like the Windows VMs do. I’ll have to see if there’s a way for me to rig that, with a script or post-install action or something (if you have a suggestion please leave me a comment!)
• The state of NTP on my ESX hosts seems to be all over the place after the upgrade. Some machines had NTP running, some didn’t, one wasn’t even configured. I’ve been going in via the Virtual Infrastructure Client and setting the service to start and stop with the host.

Conclusion so far? It’s a little rough around the edges, but I suspect a lot of this will get cleaned up with subsequent updates. Just watch your resource limit settings.