VMware released Update 1 for vSphere and vCenter this week. Nothing truly Earth shattering but a few nice enhancements in theres:
vSphere Update 1
- VMware View 4.0 support – Makes sense given the release of View 4.0.
- Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 support – Again, timely update.
- Enhanced Clustering Support for Windows Cluster – Not really adding anything to Cluster support, just making it so they can exist in a HA/DRS enabled cluster.
- Enhanced VMware Paravirtualization Support – Win2K3 and Win2K8 now support boot disks attached to paravirtualized adapters.
- Improved dvNetwork Performance – Increased performance when the ESX server is under heavy load. They also sped up adding/removing ESX hosts from the dvSwitch…which I’ve never found to be a problem.
- Intel Xeon 3400 Series Support – These are the new entry-level server Nehalem CPUs.
- Increase in vCPUs per physical core – ESX 4.0U1 now supports 25 vCPUs per physical core, up from 20. This is just a maximum limitation change…they didn’t do anything to help performance. CPUs are getting faster so a core can handle more work.
vCenter 4.0 Update 1
- IBM DB2 support
- Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 Support – Aligns with ESX 4.0U1.
- Pre-Upgrade Checker Tool – Checks the ESX hosts to make sure there will be no problems before upgrading vCenter and its agents.
- HA Cluster Maximum – HA clusters can now support up to 160 VMs per host in an 8-server cluster. Anything more than 8 still has a maximum of 40 VMs.
Minor changes, but the increase in vCPUs and VMs per host is worth noting. Now you could have a Cisco UCS blade chassis with 8 blades hosting 1,280 VMs. Now that’s density!
