I’ve been reading through the release notes for VMware vSphere 4 Update 2, and there’s a few big highlights buried in with all the bug fixes, at least for me. Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if you were waiting for a bug fix that shipped that’ll be way more important than new functionality. Some of these are pretty big, though.
1. Enhancement of the esxtop/resxtop utility. esxtop & resxtop can now show you NFS datastore performance stats, as well as power statistics (via the ‘y’ key). Both are very welcome changes, but NFS stats are killer.
2. Speed and duplex settings for a NIC might not be retained after ESX/ESXi server reboots — fixed! Thank goodness. Similarly the Host Profiles feature now properly records NIC duplex & speed settings, which was annoying.
3. Added a network setup script to configure the network without using esxcfg-* commands. /usr/sbin/console-setup — sweet! I really hate when I have to fix a misconfigured console from the console using a million commands.
4. Removing all snapshots from a virtual machine with the Delete All option can use large amounts of disk space. Read the release notes for the long story, but the short story is that they changed which deltas they start consolidating first so that they reduce the amount of space used as well as the amount of copying. I love you, VMware (in a sort of human-corporation platonic way). This is huge!
5. For devices using the roundrobin PSP the value configured for the –iops option changes after ESX host reboot. Chad Sakac wrote about this back in December, now it’s fixed. I’ve been looking forward to messing with it in the search for better round-robin load balancing to my arrays.
6. ESX fails to boot after installation on a server with more than 190GB of physical memory. All the server hardware that I just ordered has 256 GB of RAM. Just-in-time bug fixes! 🙂
It also looks like there’s been a lot of work on the VMware Tools, which is a welcome thing for many people, too. My environment has had a rocky relationship with the Tools, and I’m hoping things will get a lot better now. Overall, looks like a worthwhile release to upgrade to, and I’m going to stick it in my test environment first thing tomorrow morning!
Links:
– VMware ESX 4.0 Update 2 Release Notes
– VMware vCenter Server 4.0 Update 2 Release Notes
– Chad Sakac/Virtual Geek: vSphere 4 NMP RR IOoperationsLimit Bug and Workaround
Bob, we’ve been using RR_PSP as our default since we put in vSphere. It works really well for us. We have always left it at the default 1000 iops before switching paths.
This is how we set it when we build the OS.
esxcli nmp satp setdefaultpsp –psp VMW_PSP_RR –satp VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA