ESXi 4.1 Update1 Upgrades

I'm finally close to finishing up my esxi 4.1 upgrades. This has been the smoothest, and easiest production  upgrade I've done in a while. Testing it in the lab was a different story, though.

I wanted to start this much earlier this year.  But, I tested this in my lab environment first soon after Update 1 was released.  All the problems apparently were due to using Oracle for my vCenter database. The primary issue was a VM would lose communication with the host when doing a vmotion. There were other vCenter communication problems and a major problem starting the vCenter service. All of these problems appear to have been traced back to Oracle. There was an extremely knowledgeable and nice lady in Ireland who provided Oracle support for me.  She resolved all the problems with the exception of  vmotion.  Vmware did not seem to have a solution for this. Finally, after working on this for a couple months, I switched to an SQL database and all my problems went away.

Another thing that made my lab upgrade more complex was View 4.5. I had this running in my lab environment and wanted to preserve it. Upgrading to 4.1 with View Manager and Composer made the upgrade more complex.

But, once I got this working in the lab, the production upgrade sailed through. I had absolutely no problems upgrading vCenter to 4.1 Update2 and my esxi hosts to 4.1 Update1. I only have 5 left to do out of 27.

4.1 has some very nice features I have come to appreciate. The obvious improvement is vmotion is faster and easier. Now you can just drag and drop a VM onto a host. Because some of my esx hosts use 10 GB, I moved the vmotion port off a 1 GB interface and onto 10 GB and configured a Traffic Shaping policy to limit it to 3,000,000 Kbits/sec for the avg and peak b/w with a burst size of 3,145,728 Kbytes. Those settings have worked very well for me.

Another feature I really like is tying some VMs to a host or hosts. Because we only have one host licensed for SQL, I tied all the SQL Vms  to this. One caveat is to select "Should run on this host" and not "Must run", unless the Vms will not run on any other hosts for some reason or other. This way, if the host is not available, the VM will run on another host. I'm also using this for my exchange Vms and my Linux vms.  Linux and SQL are for licensing, and Exchange is for performance.

I also like being able to enable and disable SSH from the vSphere Client.

And finally, the performance stats are improved. Now I can see my datastore stats for an individual VM and can see the stats for my NFS storage.

In summary, 4.1 has added some very useful features in addition to increasing performance, making it more scalable, more secure, and more reliable. Overall I am very happy with 4.1. And with 4.1, my 10 GB connections work great (the issue with 4.0 Update 2 has been fixed)