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VMware vCenter 4.0 Update 2 & VMware vSPhere 4.0 Update 2 Released

jlchannel — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 04:22:30 +0000

VMware have been released VMware vCenter 4.0 Update 2 & VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 2 on 10 June 2010.

Latest version:
vCenter Server 4.0 Update 2 (Build 258672)
vSphere Client 4.0 Update 2 (Build 258672)
ESX 4.0 Update 2 (Build 261974)
VMware Tools (Build 261974)

What ‘s new about VMware vCenter 4.0 Update 2:

Guest Operating System Customization Improvements: vCenter Server now supports customization of the following guest operating systems:
- Windows XP Professional SP2 (x64) serviced by Windows Server 2003 SP2
- SLES 11 (x32 and x64)
- SLES 10 SP3 (x32 and x64)
- RHEL 5.5 Server Platform (x32 and x64)
- RHEL 5.4 Server Platform (x32 and x64)
- RHEL 4.8 Server Platform (x32 and 64)
- Debian 5.0 (x32 and x64)
- Debian 5.0 R1 (x32 and x64)
- Debian 5.0 R2 (x32 and x64)
Resolved Issues:In addition, this release delivers a number of bug fixes that have been documented in theResolved Issues section.

What ‘s new about VMware vSPhere 4.0 Update 2:

Enablement of Fault Tolerance Functionality for Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors without Fault Tolerance. vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables Fault Tolerance functionality for the Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors.
Enablement of Fault Tolerance Functionality for Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors without Fault Tolerance. vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables Fault Tolerance functionality for the Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors.
Enablement of IOMMU Functionality for AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors without input/output memory management unit (IOMMU). vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables IOMMU functionality for the AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors.
Enhancement of the esxtop/resxtop utility— vSphere 4.0 Update 2 includes an enhancement of the performance monitoring utilities, esxtop and resxtop. The esxtop/resxtop utilities now provide visibility into the performance of NFS datastores in that they display the following statistics for NFS datastores: Reads/s, writes/s, MBreads/s,MBwrtn/s, cmds/s, GAVG/s(guest latency).
Additional Guest Operating System Support— ESX/ESXi 4.0 Update 2 adds support for Ubuntu 10.04. For a complete list of supported guest operating systems with this release, see the VMware Compatibility Guide.

Check out VMware vCenter 4 Update 2 Release Notes here and VMware vSphere Update 2 Release Notes here.

In order to upgrade or download, please refer to VMware download page here.

Apply VMware vSphere 4 Update 1 Patches

jlchannel — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:12:36 +0000

VMware ESX 4.0 Update 1(Build 208167) was released on 19 Nov 2009 and I did a patch update on 3 of my vSphere Dev Servers included of 1 ESX (build 164009) server and 2 ESXi (build 164009 & 171294) servers on Dell PE2950 today.

The Redhat Linux and Windows 2003 & 2008 Virtual Machines VMware tools upgraded successful and everything look goods after the Update 1 patched.

I would suggest you refer to VMware Communities – vSphere Upgrade and Install forum & “vSphere 4u1 – any issues” thread before apply any VMware vSphere ESX/ESXi Update 1 patches on production environment.

Read more details about VMware ESX 4.0 Update 1 Release Notes here.

Updated:
Please make sure you check VMware Knowledge Base – Upgrading ESX 4.0 to 4.0 U1 using Update Manager fails or times out and rebooting the host results in a purple diagnostic screen
A quick note: The problem with U1 is now known to be limited to HP Proliant systems and HP Insight Management agents are running.

How to update VMware ESX patch using CLI

jlchannel — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:29:05 +0000

Using VMware Update Manager is pretty easy for VMware patch update but I would like to share about how to update VMware ESX patch using command line interface here as an alternative way.

First download VMware patch from VMware download web site said for an example:
VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2
Latest Version: 3.5 Update 2 | 8/13/2008 | Build: 110268

Option 1:

Once completed the VMware patch download, you can either copy the patch source file to Apache or IIS web server and unzip it said http://webserver.malaysiavm.com/esxupdate/

Before continue with VMware ESX host patch, you can vmotion all VMware guest from ESX host 1 to VMware ESX host 2. Connect to VMware ESX host 1 box using SSH,

Enter server maintenance mode:
vimsh -n -e /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter

Tips: How can I check whether ESX host is in maintenance mode.
vimsh -n -e /hostsvc/runtimeinfo | grep inMaintenanceMode | awk ‘{print $3}’

Turn Off Firewall:
esxcfg-firewall -allowOutgoing

ESX patch update:
esxupdate -r http://webserver/esxupdate/ update

Option 2:

Copy patch source files into ESX host itself said for an example folder /download/esxupdate

Enter maintenance mode:
vimsh -n -e /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter

Turn Off Firewall:
esxcfg-firewall -allowOutgoing

ESX patch update:
cd /download/esxupdate; esxupdate update

Let’s wait for a while and VMware host patch should be in progress now. The ESX host should be reboot once the patch completed.

Turn On Firewall:
esxcfg-firewall -blockOutgoing

Exit maintenance mode:
vimsh -n -e /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_exit

Again, we can check ESX host patch update using command:

cat /proc/vmware/version
OR
vmware -v
OR
esxupdate -l query

Congratulation! You’re done. You should have latest VMware ESX patch now!

Please feel free to comment to make it more useful to everyone.