During the re-installation, you I will suggest you follow the sequence to un-install all the vCenter application 1 by 1. Update Manager required to be un-install before you uninstall the vCenter server. You can backup and re-attach the SQL DB as the MDF and LDF files is in place. If your vCenter is on virtual environment, strongly recommend a snapshot taken before any changes been made. Once you re-attach the DB, you will require to perform the DSN connections to be created from ODBC.

Here is the tricky part you need to take note. It take me 2 hours to figure out due to some confuse and mistake. vCenter Server will able to run on 64 bits DSN as standard, you will not face any issue on that. When come to update manager, DO NOT try to access the ODBCAD32.exe from start run directly on windows. It will point you to the 64 bits ODBC configuration tab. You will require to browse to the path directly as :

%systemdrive%\Windows\SysWoW64\Odbcad32.exe

Honestly speaking, I had no idea why windows had this issue which you required to manually execute the file follow the full path rather than the auto search, this I leave it to Microsoft to explain . Once you launch the right odbcad32.exe, you will able to access the 32 bit ODBC to create the DSN as usual. How you compare whether is correct, the DSN on the vCenter server that you created on 64 bits will not shown on the 32 bits. Then of course you can continue whatever necessary installation to complete the upgrade or installation as usual. Good Luck!!!!!!

Related posts:

1. Bugs on ESX Host and vCenter for ESX 4.0 Update 2

Well, there are many users, partner, or even principle who are reluctant to accept changes or new thing, which claimed nexus 1000V doesn’t bring any value while created problems to their day to day job. The main reason behind as they struggling to manage and configured nexus 1000v, mostly because they are just not the right person to manage it. Please do not feel offended with this statement, as I am telling the truth which myself are not the right person to configure SAP, Oracle, BI cognos too. We always need specified specialist and expertise from different area to compliment each others in IT environment.

That is why Cisco and VMware are alligned to create this virtual switch Nexus 1000V, which Xen open source are trying to follow the same now. For Enterprise IT, proper change management and ownership are important to be in placed, unless you think that ITIL practices doesn’t bring any value to the IT operation. Without Nexus 1000V, Network operation are out of picture for the virtualization operation practices and support as there had no visibility due to NIC teaming, load balancing configurations and non-transparency and integration with security devices allow by using the DEFAULT DVSwtich or Standard vSwtich from VMware. This happen to all the previous Generation Virtualization deployed before vSphere 4.

For the story I heard, he blame the Nexus 1000V doesn’t work just because he struggling to create port profile, VLAN assignment and etc on the Cisco Nexus 1000V. This could be easily done by a network admin in any organization and a great team work and participation could be created while introducing Virtualization or Cloud computing in Enterprise Environment.

I agreed as not everyone will able to handle server, storage, security, network and facility in a single person. I will always advise my friends and buddies to understand the different functional team’s technology and operation which allow us to better understand the integration requirements from different pieces in the infrastructure. I am not a network expert, but I did pickup nexus 1000V as we learn from previous experience, without nexus 1000V could be a nightmare for large virtualization environment. If you are deploying a small scale virtualization for SMB with less than 10 VMs, you may not require Nexus 1000V, but if large scale deployment, please consider this solution as part of your technical design consideration.

Virtualization & Cloud Computing require Network to deliver the services by resources sharing, if security and manageability are not address properly, the risk to business is very high. “The world is transforming, Changes are necessary”, we will be either ON the train or OFF the train in the fast pace moving IT world.

Cisco Nexus 1000V is a enhance virtual distributed virtual switch which integrate to the VMware vSphere 4. With Cisco Nexus 1000V, you will contain VSM and VEM, which VSM will be the virtual appliances that host the management of Nexus 1000V, and VEM will be installed on each ESX host that been connected to the Nexus 1000V.  I will not go in too details about Nexus 1000V in this post as my intention is to clear up the confusion on the VN-Link meant by Cisco.

6 months ago, this new term had come to my career while someone had claimed that the VN-Link will allow virtual machine to direct interact to the physical IO devices on the PCI-E without hypervisor in place. Well, this features had been included in VMware for quite some times in vSphere 4 by using the functionality call VMDirectPath I/O. But while doing this, you will lose the functionality of VMotion, and most users will not go for this due to the limitation on VMotion. Since this is new, no right or wrong, I decided to leave it for a while and further research to understand it.

After many round of discussion and reading on the blog and white paper, finally I have the answer I want now. VN-Link is the product name for a family of products, does not specifically refer to any one product so forget the idea of hardware vs. software implementation, etc.  Think of the Nexus family of switches: 1000v, 2000, 4000, 5000, 7000.  All different products solving different design goals but are components of the Data Center 3.0 portfolio from Cisco.  In VN-Link it contains Cisco Nexus 1000V, Hypervisor Bypass with Direct Path I/O, Pass Through Switching, Virtual Interface card & VNTag. If you had done the administration or implementation on Cisco UCS, Nexus 1000V, Nexus 5000 & 2000, you should familar with all these term that I mentioned here.

For more details information, I will recommend the Unified Computing Blog who had done the good explanation to described further in details for the VN-Link technology.

I tried to select thin provision option when I perform the next virtual machine. The thin provision will be maintained as usual after the storage vMotion completed. Well, looks like there are some minor issue on the option to be selected from the migration process on vcenter and vsphere 4. Not a major issue for me, but it may confused others user.

• GUI setup following software install
• Layer 3 control between VSM and VEMs
• Virtual Service Domains for classifying and separating traffic for network services
• iSCSI Multipath—supporting multipath feature introduced in vSphere 4
• XML API for developing client apps for managing/monitoring the Nexus 1000V
• DHCP Snooping for validating DHCP messages and filtering invalid responses
• Dynamic ARP Inspection for validating ARP requests and responses
• IP Source Guard for filtering traffic on interfaces to valid MAC and IP addresses
• MAC Pinning for assigning Ethernet port members to particular port channel subgroup (where upstream switches do not support port channels)
• Static Pinning

There are more new features in the latest release and please read more from here.

Please view more information from the release note.

Beside the bug fixes, there are some new key highlight here too.

VMware View 4.0 support – This release adds support for VMware View 4.0, a solution built specifically for delivering desktops as a managed service from the protocol to the platform.

Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 support –Officially Supported both windows 7 and 2008 R2 for 32 bits and 64 bits. The previous issue for the viclient that could not run on Windows 7 had been solved

Enhanced Clustering Support for Microsoft Windows – Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) for Windows 2000 and 2003 and Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering is now supported on an  (HA) and (DRS) cluster in a limited configuration.

Enhanced VMware Paravirtualized SCSI Support – Support for boot disk devices attached to a Paravirtualized SCSI ( PVSCSI) adapter has been added for Windows 2003 and 2008 guest operating systems

Improved vNetwork Distributed Switch Performance – Several performance and usability issues have been resolved resulting in the following:

• Improved performance when making configuration changes to a vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) instance when the ESX/ESXi host is under a heavy load
• Improved performance when adding or removing an ESX/ESXi host to or from a vDS instance

Increase vCPU per Core Limit – The limit on vCPUs per core has been increased from 20 to 25. This change raises the supported limit only. It does not include any additional performance optimizations.

If you plan to have VMotion over long distance, you may need to full fill the requirements as listed above.  Virtual Geek had blog it in details about the long distance vmotion supported on vmware. Feel free to take a look here.