What’s new in ESX 3.5 & VC 2.5? (part 3)

The quest continues…

In my previous post I stopped at the performance tab at the hosts level and will now continue with the “Configuration” tab.

Configuration tab

First thing to notice are the extra options “Time configuration” and “Virtual Machine Swapfile location”. When selecting a ESX 3.0.2 host, the “Virtual Machine Swapfile location” option is not displayed, but the “Time configuration” option is. Its just limited in options now.

In the hardware settings for processors, memory and storage I can’t spot any differences with previous versions. In the networking properties there is a little extra balloon showing behind each nic. If you click it, it displays the Cisco Discovery Protocol settings. I haven’t used CDP before so I google a little on it and found this link with some explanation about it: http://www.javvin.com/protocolCDP.html

I browsed through all the other network options, creating vSwitches adding nics etc, but can’t find any news there. I was just wondering, when creating a new vSwitch, is the option “Promiscuous Mode” always set to “Reject” ? Not sure if the default changed here.

Storage adapters

Couldn’t find any new options in here, but I was very pleased to find that my SATA controller showed ass Storage device :-) I have an ASUS P2M5-SAS mainbord which I choose because of the LSI Logic Controller that emulates SCSI for the SAS controller. Now I probably can connect my disks directly to it. Small problem with the LSI controller is that you have to create an array (raid1 or 5) to present the disks to ESX. My guess is that I don’t need to do this anymore with the SATA disks.

Network adapater

A new column here: “Wake on LAN supported”. This feature is needed for Distributed Power Management. DRS is now able to powerdown a host when it doesn’t have a workload, should the host be needed again, then a Wake On LAN signal is needed to power it on again. Jeremy van Doorn (VMware) explained that this feature still experimental because integration with monitoring tools isn’t finished yet. Should DRS decide that an ESX host can be powered down, a lot of alarms will be triggered on severall external tools because they don’t understand why the host went down. Another thing I thought of myself, the HP DL 585 server I’m working with at my customers site, don’t power down. If I enter a “shutdown -h now”, ESX goes down, but finaly holds with the message “You can power down your system now” (or similar :D). My guess is that WOL won’t be able to power on the server when its in this state.

I was pleased to find that suddenly my Intel NIC showed in the Network adapters list. This nic wasn’t supported or found when ESX 3.0.2 was running on it. I also noticed a change in vSwitches. I used to have a vswitch vsw-vm01 to which vmnic0 and vmnic1 were assigned. Now it only has vmnic0 assigned. The intel nic that was left in the system and is recognized now, became vmnic2 and my other nic which used to be vmnic1, has now become vmnic3. So be sure to backup your nic config / vSwitch config before upgrading. Although I guess only few people have non-working nics in their system before upgrading :-)

Licensed Features

At a first glance, nothing new here. But when selecting the license source, there is a different window for selecting the license source. There are 4 options now.

1. “Use evaluation mode”. This provides unlimited host services during the evaluation period. It may not be selected once the evaluation has expired.
2. “Use serial number”. License host edition and add-ons using a serial number.
3. “Use License Server”. Acquire licenses for host edition and add-ons on demand from the following server. VirtualCenter may change this server while this host is under management.
4. “Use Host License file”. License host edition and add-ons using a file installed on the host.

Time Settings

This option makes it much easier to configure NTP. When you click properties, you first have a window in which you can set the date and time manually, next you can enable or disable the NTP client. Through the “Options” button you can configure the general settings and NTP settings. The general settings let you set the startup behavior of the NTP daemon. You can also start, stop and restart the NTP daemon at this point. The NTP settings let you define the NTP servers you wish to use. Nice feature is that enabling or disabling the NTP client, also updates your security profile and opens or closes the NTP client port (123). Hmmm, this would be nice with iSCSI. I’ve seen a number of failed iSCSI installations because the admin forgot to open iSCSI port on the firewall.

DNS and Routing

No changes here I guess.

Virtual Machine Startup / Shutdown

Again no changes.

Virtual Machine Swapfile location

This is a completely new feature. You can choose if your VM stores its swapfile with the VMX file or on a different datastore. This datastore can also be a local VMFS datastore !!! I remember that when running a Microsoft Cluster within ESX, there is the requirement that the boot-drive of your Windows guest, has to be on local storage. Someone explained me this is because sometimes there might be just too much delay if the guest wants to write to swapfile which might trigger the cluster to failover. I asked Jeremy van Doorn if I would now be able to put the cluster VM on SAN and VMotion it, but he thinks this is not the case yet. Unfortunately :-)

Security Profile

No changes here

System Resource Allocation

Looks like no changes to me

Advanced Settings

I did notice some changes here, but I can’t find all of them. For sure I know that LVM has much less options to configure. There are some new sections called VMKernel and Config section. I’m not sure if options have just moved arround, seemed a bit much to search for now :-)

That’s all for the “Configuration tab” of a host through VC2.5.