New in VMware vSphere 4.1

What's New in VMware vSphere 4.1

vCenter Converter Hyper-V Import - vCenter Converter allows users to point to a Hyper-V machine. Converter displays the virtual machines running on the Hyper-V system, and users can select a powered-off virtual machine to import to a VMware destination.

http://vmware.com/pdf/vsp_vcc_42_admin_guide.pdf
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vCenter Security Primer

vCenter Security Primer:

Similar to Windows security, a user granted permission to an object via 2 or more group memberships will in effect have the sum of all group membership privileges.

Dissimilar to Windows security, a user granted permission to an object explicitly (not through a group) will result in the explicit permission being effective. It's similar to the way the "deny" permission works in Windows.
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Service Console command dmesg

Virtu-Al (Alan Renouf) posted a great two-page cheat sheet for PowerCLI:
http://www.virtu-al.net/2009/12/04/powercli-quick-reference-guide/

This gem of a document is similar to vSphere4 card created by Forbes Guthrie over at vReference.com:
http://www.vreference.com/vsphere4-card/

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vExpert Awards

On this day in 2009, VMware announced the vEXPERT Awards. 300 recipients are awarded the first ever vExpert status. vEXPERTs were chosen on the basis of contributions they made to the community of VMware and virtualization users in 2008. VMware will hand out the vEXPERT awards on an annual basis.

In June 2010, a new batch of vEXPERTs was announced.

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2009/02/vmware-vexpert-awards.html
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Ultimate Deployment Appliance

Jumbo Frames (an Ethernet frame with an MTU greater than 1500, commonly configured for 9000 - the VMware maximum) are easy to toggle on an existing vSwitch. However, configuring Jumbo Frames on a VMkernel portgroup can only be performed during the creation of the portgroup. If enabling Jumbo Frames is an after thought, you'll need to delete and recreate the VMkernel portgroup which will need to be planned carefully.
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Ultimate Deployment Appliance

UDA (Ultimate Deployment Appliance) is a popular free PXE boot deployment tool by Carl Thijssen. Out of the box, it's configured with its own DHCP server. Configure UDA to use your network's native MS DHCP service in a 2 step process:
1) Disable DHCP in UDA
2) Set option 066 on your MS DHCP server with the UDA IP address
3) Set option 067 on your MS DHCP server with the string pxelinux.0
http://www.ultimatedeployment.org/
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Display mappings

Use the Service Console command esxcfg-scsidevs to display the mappings between vmhba names and /dev names.

i.e.
esxcfg-scsidevs
or
esxcfg-scsidevs -m
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IOMETER

The mostly widely used and accepted standard for disk I/O performance, benchmarking, and comparisons is a free tool named IOMETER (ESXTOP would also be used for ESX environments).

IOMETER is available at: http://www.iometer.org/

How does your storage stack up against others in the community? Check out this thread and compare:
http://communities.vmware.com/message/584154
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DRS Affinity/Anti-Affinity

DRS Affinity/Anti-Affinity rules are nice features which I consider the precursor to vApps where VMs are tied together to run on the same host. VMware provides no export feature to document the rules and, by virtue of their location, they are hidden and easily forgotten. Dominic Rivera provides a PowerShell script to export anti-affinity rules.

http://vmprofessional.com/2009/06/drs-and-anti-affinity-rules.html
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Secure your VI3 license pool

Secure your VI3 license pool with an Options file:

The FlexLM license tool in VI3 essentially lets any host on the network draw from its available license pool, exhausting licenses and features in the process.

Add security to your valuable license pool by implementing an Options file which dictates which network hosts can check out a license from the pool.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1000955
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ESX Service Who command

At the ESX Service Console, the who command will display a list of users who are currently logged on to the host, as well as the network host they are connecting from in the case of a remote session.

i.e.
[root@esx3l /etc]# who
root pts/0 Jul 26 14:53 (workstation.boche.mcse)
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Journaling

Modern versions of the VMFS file system (VMFS-3 and newer) include journaling. Journaling logs changes to a journal (typically a circular log in a dedicated area) before committing them to the main file system. Journaling file systems are less likely to become corrupted in the event of a power failure or system crash.
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Configuration Maximums Comparison

Configuration Maximums Comparison

RAM per VM:
ESX(i) 4.1: 255GB
ESX(i) 4.0 Update 1: 255GB
ESX(i) 3.5 Update 5: 65,532MB (64GB - 4MB)
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ESX host name

Technically speaking, an ESX host name can be immediately changed using the hostname command; however, this change does not survive a reboot & there would likely be some dependency failures.

Permanently changing the host name requires a few steps. HA should also be reconfigured on each host in a cluster if a host name is changed. Be sure to make the necessary DNS changes when a host name change occurs.
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VM commands

/usr/sbin/esxcfg-swiscsi is used to manage VMkernel software iSCSI (swISCSI)
/usr/sbin/vmkiscsi-tool is used to manage a hardware iSCSI initiator device
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ESX builds

At the ESX Service Console, use the fuser command to show which processes are using a specified file, file system, or socket.

i.e.
[root@esx3l /etc]# /sbin/fuser -u /sbin/fuser
/sbin/fuser: 3793e(root)
[root@esx3l /etc]# /sbin/fuser -u /var/log/vmkernel
/var/log/vmkernel: 1208(root) 2181(root)
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New in VMware vSphere 4.1

What's New in VMware vSphere 4.1

IPv6 Enhancements - IPv6 in ESX supports Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) with manual keying.

http://bit.ly/bNrQRZ
http://bit.ly/9a2NoE

On 8/24/10, VMware vSphere 4.1 has been awarded IPv6Ready Logo 02-C-000488 for IPv6 RFC compliance.
http://bit.ly/du8NNd
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vCenter Statistics Rollups

vCenter Statistics Rollups

Real Time = 1 hour of real time stats refreshed every 20 seconds. Not stored in the vCenter database
Past Day = Real Time stats rolled up w/ 1 data point for every 5 minutes
Past Week = Past Day stats rolled up w/ 1 data point for every 30 minutes
Past Month = Past Week stats rolled up w/ 1 data point for ever 2 hours
Past Year = Past Month stats rolled up w/ 1 data point per day
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Configuration

/etc/vmware/esx.conf stores much of the configuration for both ESX and ESXi hosts. It wouldn't be a bad idea to capture snapshots of this file on a monthly or quarterly basis to discover unknown changes to the infrastructure. The 'diff' command will reveal the difference between two file versions. For example:

diff /etc/vmware/esx.conf /etc/vmware/esx.conf.old
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New in VMware vSphere 4.1

What's New in VMware vSphere 4.1

Concurrent VMware Data Recovery Sessions - vSphere 4.1 provides the ability to concurrently manage multiple VMware Data Recovery appliances.

http://vmware.com/pdf/vdr_12_admin.pdf
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vSwitches

vSwitches cannot be connected with any type of virtual uplink native to the hypervisor. Because of this, there are no potential loop conditions to avoid and thus vSwitches have no need to run Spanning Tree Protocol. This can be viewed as a benefit when comparing virtualized vSwitches to physical switches in your network infrastructure.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/virtual_networking_concepts.pdf
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Jumbo Frame

Any packet larger than 1500 MTU is a Jumbo Frame. vSphere fully supports Jumbo Frames for virtual machines as well as NAS & iSCSI traffic.

Configure a vSwitch for Jumbo Frames with:
esxcfg-vswitch -m [MTU] [vSwitch_name]

Configure a VMkernel interface for Jumbo Frames with:
esxcfg-vmknic -a -i [ip_address] -n [netmask] -m [MTU] [portgroup_name]
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New in VMware vSphere 4.1

What's New in VMware vSphere 4.1

vCenter Update Manager Support for Provisioning, Patching, & Upgrading EMC's ESX PowerPath Module - VUM can manage 3rd party ESX modules, such as EMC's PowerPath multipathing software. Using VUM to set policies using the Baseline construct & the comprehensive Compliance Dashboard, you can simplify provisioning, patching, and upgrade of the PowerPath module at scale.

http://bit.ly/a0p5dK
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New in VMware vSphere 4.0

Virtual NICs:
Vlance = Virtualized AMD 79C970 PCnet32 LANCE NIC
VMXNET = Optimized NIC for ESX 2.x
Flexible = Reports as a Vlance during VM boot but initializes as Vlance or VMXNET, depending on which driver is loaded for it
E1000 = Virtualized Intel 82545EM Gb Ethernet NIC for newer OS
VMXNET2 (Enhanced) = Supports Jumbo Frames & TSO
VMXNET3 = Next gen paravirtualized NIC, supports multiqueue, IPv6 offloads, MSI/MSI-X
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New in VMware vSphere 4.1

What's New in VMware vSphere 4.1

VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) Enhancements - Introduces an FT-specific versioning-control mechanism that allows Primary & Secondary VMs to run on FT-compatible hosts at different but compatible patch levels. In addition, you can disable VMware HA when FT-enabled VMs are deployed in a cluster, allowing for cluster maintenance operations without turning off FT.

http://bit.ly/9LqILr
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