VMWare Upgrades
by Jesse on Dec.22, 2007, under Nagios, VMWare
I got the notification a while back that VMWare ESX v3.5 is out. I read everything I could about it to determine if it was going to work on my almost out-of-date hardware (This site as well as most of my infrastructure runs on a pair of Dell 2650 servers running ESX)
So very carefully, I shut-down the VM’s on the smaller server and boot from the 3.5 CD.
I have to say, as always, I’m impressed. The VMWare upgrade went absolutely without incident, took about 35 minutes, and added a few new options that I think are just about the coolest thing.
One of the new features is the ability to import a virtual appliance directly from the VMWare Virtual Appliance Marketplace.
So the long and the short of it, let’s say you need to put a nagios box online in short order.
Go to http://www.vmware.com/appliance and search for “nagios”
Select from one of the 319 search results – find the solution that best fits your environment.
Download the appliance – then use the Import menu to import it directly to your server.
Simple as that.
December 24th, 2007 on 9:04 am
There are much cooler things than that…
How about the option of doing round robin load balancing on hba’s? I can’t tell you how much I hate that they are owned by EMC, and only do failover with the old version.
How about hot migration across luns?
That last one alone is worth a migration. When an environment gets as large as ours(4 bladecenters and growing, 700+ vms going to 1600) hot migration is gold.
January 2nd, 2008 on 1:36 pm
Wow – I guess I should read the release notes more carefully.
The only problem I encountered is that I didn’t have enough space on my VMWare system partition to do the upgrade on one of my servers. I’m guessing that I tried to conserve space and blew myself up. It took a lot of ‘finessing’ to get it under the limit, and I’m guessing I’m not going to be as lucky next time.
What I would like to know – if anyone can answer this, if you can hot-relocate a VM from one server to another without SAN/NAS storage behind it?
January 2nd, 2008 on 6:33 pm
I doubt it, but if it’s a vmfs partition, it might be possible.
January 3rd, 2008 on 6:01 pm
Going from ESX 2.5->3.01 they had something called dmotion which allowed you do a one-way migration to a different host with a newer VMFS type. ESX2.5 couldn’t understand VMFS3, VMFS2 was read-only on ESX3 so you either had to shut down all guests in the VMFS store or move them one at a time vmotioning them across hosts (but copying both the storage & memory, rather than just the memory). ESX 3.5 released this month was supposed to have this feature in general (they now call it storage vmotion), but they added a requirement that for storage vmotion the old and new datastore must be visible to the same host. Which unless you are using a shared DAS device probably negates what you are trying to do.