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Yesterday, I did an APC PCNS installation for 4 unit of VMware vSphere 4 on my customer site and one of the ESX host go wild.

For some reason, I can’t login and the particular ESX host was disconnect for few minutes on vCenter server. Again, the console fly tons of weird error message for few minutes as screen shot below.

click to enlarge.
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The new VSI plugin from EMC allow VMware administrator to self service, manage and provide transparency and visibility about the back end SAN storage in the vSphere infrastructure. This had transformed the traditional way how the VMware administrator manage and operate the virtual infrastructure in the past. All of us may agreed that the SAN configuration details are not visible to us previously due to lack of visibility in the management console. If you would like to verify something on the SAN, you may require assistant from the SAN admin, due to restricted access to the SAN box. Now with the new VSI plug-in, it will able to provide the necessary configuration information to the VMware administrator without having to engage the SAN admin to verify some minor information. The VSI plugin support all platform for EMC product range include Clariion, Celerra and Symmetrix.

Here show the plug-in which integrated the the vi-client directly

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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.

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For the past few weeks, my customers keep received an alarm “Host connection failure” email alerts via VMware vCenter but end up it’s a false alarm.

The email alert example as below:
Target: kulsrvprd01.malaysiavm.com
Stateless event alarm

Alarm Definition:
([Event alarm expression: Cannot connect host - incorrect Ccagent] OR [Event alarm expression: Cannot connect host - network error] OR [Event alarm expression: Cannot connect host - time-out] OR [Event alarm expression: Cannot connect host - time-out] OR [Event alarm expression: Host connection lost])

Event details:
Host kulsrvprd01.malaysiavm.com in DC1 is not responding

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Many of you may had slowly migrated your vcenter to windows 2008 64 bits or R2 recently. As we know, the vCenter server will still require a 32 bit DSN to connect to the 64 bit SQL database even the operating system are currently on 64 bits. You may able to search this on the google easily which suggest you to execute this command odbcad32 from start run to create the 32 bits client, but this may not work actually. I done twice and I hit the same problem as the ODBC console launch are still 64 bits.

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