VMware vSphere 4.1 was release on 13 July 2010 last week. VMware vSphere 4.1 introduced an impressive number of new features and new licensing format.
The following is complete VMware vSphere 4.1 license comparison chart.

click to enlarge.
Read more »
To support VLANs for VMware Infrastructure users, the virtual or physical network must tag the Ethernet frames with 802.1Q tags using virtual switch tagging (VST), virtual machine guest tagging (VGT), or external switch tagging (EST). If you’re looking for how to configure VLAN tagging in VMware vSphere, you may refer to VMware KB 1004074 & KB 1004252.
Last week I have configured a VLAN tagging on one of my vSphere 4 Update 2 cluster and due to some reason, I have remove the VLAN ID manually.

Read more »
With the VMware vSphere 4.1 release, VMware had officially supported the Windows 2008 R2 with the latest release of the official document. It had taken such a long period for VMWare to officially announce in the compatibility matrix documentation.
Please find the full information from here.
Read more »
I just got an email this morning from VMware inform that the official version of VMware vSphere 4.1 are available to be downloaded from the official website. There are a lot of improvement if you compare ESX 4.1 VS ESX 4.0.
Significant Improve on Scalability, IO control for both Network and Storage, Active Directory Integration on Host level, up to 8 vMotion concurrent session at 1 time.
For short review as what’s new on ESX 4.1, you can refer to the official link here.
Read more »
I was busy setup the demo solution for the Cisco summit yesterday. The Demo we had were displaying the VMware, Cisco UCS, Nexus 5000, MDS 9124 & Netapp Storage Solution. 1 of the Surprise thing happened during the setup, which the power source for our MDS 9124 had been tripped during the installation yesterday. In this scenerio, all our connection to ESX host and VM were disconnected. It took us for 25 mins to recovered the power failure and the MDS Switch was back on line after that. I was thought to reboot all the ESX host as we are performing BOOT FROM SAN for all the ESX hosts that we setup. Surprise happened here, which I found all the ESX host were still continue running. I did the command uptime and check the system uptime from vcenter, it showed that the ESX host were not rebooted during the SAN connection drop from UCS to our Netapp FAS storage.
I further checked the virtual machines been power on in the ESX servers, which show all the VM were continue running without system crash or rebooted. Now I realize that the failure on SAN switch may not necessary result system crash or hung, in fact it may allow you resume the system state once the SAN switch are back online, of course, this is no guarantee assumption, just some surprise finding experienced yesterday would like to share here. Read more »