VMware Infrastructure 3.5 U2 now available

 

After all the dramatic news from VMware over the last month or so, it may feel like the availability of VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2 is not particularly newsworthy but there are a few things quietly being delivered that merit a good deal of attention.

 

Enhanced VMotion compatibility. (EVC)

 

Previous releases of VMware Infrastructure restricted VMotion between processors belonging to different generations even if they were from the same manufacturer. These restrictions were put in place to ensure that a consistent CPU feature set was always exposed to software.

 

KB Articles 1991 (Intel) and 1992 (AMD) describe the current compatibility groups for VMotion. KB article 1993 described methods for masking select features to relax the compatibility requirements.

 

 

The reason I think Enhanced VMotion is something VMware users should care about is because it radically simplifies the process of determining VMotion compatibility.  

 

VMware worked closely with AMD and Intel on the specification for AMD-V Extended Migration and Intel FlexMigration technologies which are used to make newer generation CPUs backward compatible with older CPU generations. 

 

With EVC, it is now much easier to add newer generation hardware into your existing VMware infrastructure while maintaining VMotion compatibility between the new and the older hardware. This makes adding new ESX hosts and retiring older hosts easier since you no longer need to worry much about CPU VMotion compatibility. Best of all, it’s really simple. No complicated compatibility matrices, and no CPU masks! Woohoo!

 

Processors included in the new enhanced VMotion compatibility for Intel are:

 

• Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processor 7300
• Quad core Intel Xeon processor 5100/5200/5300/5400 series, based on the Intel® Core™ microarchitecture
• Future Xeon processors based on Enhanced Intel® Core™ Microarchitecture.

For those familiar with Intel code names, these are Intel Core 2 (Merom) based processors and Intel Core 2 Duo (Penryn) based processors. All future processors from Intel with Intel VT FlexMigration will be VMotion compatible as well.

 

Processors included in the new enhanced VMotion compatibility for AMD are:

 

• First-Generation AMD Opteron ™ Rev. E  
• AMD Second-Generation AMD Opteron
• Third-Generation AMD Opteron as well as future AMD Opteron™ processors.

* This is documented on pg 239 of the Basic Systems Administration Guide for VMware ESX 3.5 U2. We're still trying to get the processor marketing names into this doc. Please comment on this blog if you use marketing names to identify your processor...and think this is a worthwhile exercise.

 

Although EVC makes great strides in enabling VMotion across multiple CPU generations from the same vendor, it is not possible to VMotion from AMD processors to Intel processors or vice versa. Will it ever happen? Anyone want to place bets?

 

 

VSS Quiescing for Windows Applications:

 

VCB is possibly the least understood component of VMware Infrastructure. So one might wonder why I’m making a big deal with VCB 1.5.

VCB 1.5 now uses new components inside the updated VMware Tools package to provide application level quiescing(Windows 2003 VMs) in addition to filesystem level quiescing. This means that, if you are using backup products integrated with VCB to backup virtual machines, the snapshots of virtual machines will now have the assured application consistency if the applications running inside support VSS. Significant performance optimizations also make the backup process much faster with this version of VCB.

 

 

Monitoring and availability enhancements

 

With Update 2, VMware ESXi (yes, the free one) has been enriched to provide better hardware health information for Qlogic, Emulex, LSI components in your server as well as additional asset information used by HP Insight Manager. Overall, this augments the manageability of ESXi as we continue to deepen the information it can gather about the underlying hardware. Some of our larger customers are now standardizing on ESXi because they love its small footprint and low maintenance (they’re standardizing on ESXi as the hypervisor and VMware Infrastructure to still provide the VMotion, DRS, HA etc). Now the enhanced manageability had taken away all barriers for them!

 

With VMware Infrastructure 3.5, we had introduced experimentally, a feature for virtual machine failure monitoring with VMware HA. This feature uses VMware Tools to monitor the operating system inside the virtual machine and can be configured to restart the VM in the event of failures or crashes of the OS. With Update 2, we now fully support this feature!

Why am I picking out this one as a notable feature? Well, we got a lot of bad press about releasing experimental features with 3.5 and one by one, we’re moving to full support on them. Slowly but surely.

 

 

VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2 has many more interesting features – such as live cloning for virtual machines, guided consolidation enhancements and the much awaited support for Windows 2008 editions…read the release notes to find out more!