Chances are if you’re reading this blog, you’re already familiar with virtualization and more specifically, VMWare’s latest offering; vSphere (ESX 4.0). As the nitty gritty details are readily available on the VMWare website, I’ll skip the fluff and give my personal impressions of the features I’ve used so far.
The Upgrade
I started using ESX in 3.0, so this wasn’t my first time movin’ on up to the upper east side, or in this case a newer and better version of VMWare ESX. The upgrade of vCenter server went poorly, having plugin issues and database issues that at the time did not have widely known fixes or workarounds. I don’t care about performance history all that much so I did a full uninstall/reinstall of vCenter, including the database, and all was well. Upgrading the ESX hosts was so easy, I won’t waste much time talking about it. Using upgrade baselines in vCenter I plugged the ESX4 iso in, ran a scan, then individually remediated each of our four hosts in the same manner that I would when installing patches. It was that easy.
Storage vMotion
Among the new features in vSphere, Storage vMotion was at the top of my wish list. vMotion had always been great when it came to host patching, because I could do it during business hours without interuption, but if I needed to move a VM to a different datastore, I was going to have to come in at night or on the weekend. Storage vMotion works in a similar manner to regular vMotion, allowing you to move a VM without disruption. I have tested this with small VMs and very large VMs, and the only time I experienced any issues was during peak SAN I/O. This feature is great, and has gone a long way toward eliminating VM downtime entirely.
iSCSI Optimization
Numerous advances have been made when it comes to iSCSI performance, particularly when using the software iSCSI client in ESX 4.0. With these performance benefits, and the ability to use multipath i/0, you can squeeze more disk performance out of your virtual platform than ever before.
Virtual Hardware Limits
When it comes to available virtual hardware, the ceiling has been raised in ESX 4.0. More memory, more vCPU, what else could we ask for?
That’s all I’ve got for now, but there will probably be a part 2 once I get my hands dirty with some of the other new features of vSphere.
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