It’s been just over a week since VMware released vSphere 6 Update 2 and I thought I would go through some of the key features and fixes that are included in the latest versions of vCenter and ESXi. As usual I generally keep an eye out for improvements that relate back to Service Providers who use vSphere as the foundation of their Managed or Infrastructure as as Service offerings.

vsphere6_u2_1
New Features:

Without question the biggest new feature is the release of VSAN 6.2. I’ve covered this release in previous blog posts and when you upgrade to ESXi 6.0 Update 2 the VSAN 6.2 bits are present within the kernel. Some VSAN services are actually in play regardless if you have it configured or not…which is interesting. With the new pricing for VSAN through the vCAN program, Service Providers now can seriously think about deploying VSAN for their main IaaS platforms.

The addition of support for High Speed Ethernet Links is significant not only because of the addition of 25G and 50G link speeds means increased throughput for converged network cards allowing for more network traffic to flow through hosts and switches for Fault Tolerance, vMotion, Storage vMotions and storage traffic but also because it allows SPs to think about building Edge Clusters for networking services such as NSX and allow the line speeds to take advantage of even higher backends.

From a manageability point of view the Host Client HTML5 user interface is a welcome addition and hopefully paves the way for more HTML5 management goodness from VMware for not only hosts…but also vCenter its self. There is a fair bit of power already in the Host Client and I can bet that admins will start to use it more and more as it continues to evolve.

vsphere6_u2_2

For vCenter the addition of Two-Factor Authentication using RSA or Smartcard technology is an important feature for SPs to use if they are considering any sort of certification for their services. For example many government based certifications such as IRAP require this to be certified.

Resolved Issues:

There are a bunch of resolved issues in this build and I’ve gone through the rather extensive list to pull out the biggest fixes that relate to my experience in service provider operations.

vCenter:

  • Upgrading vCenter Server from 5.5 Update 3b to 6.0 Update 1b might fail if SSLv3 is disabled on port 7444 of vCenter Server 5.5 Update 3b. An upgrade from vCenter Server 5.5 Update 3b to 6.0 Update 2 works fine if SSLv3 is disabled by default on 7444 port of vCenter Server 5.5 Update 3b.
  • Deploying a vApp on vCloud Director through the vApp template fails with a Profile-Driven storage error. When you refresh the storage policy, an error message similar to the following is displayed: The entity vCenter Server is busy completing an operation.
  • Delta disk names of the source VM are retained in the disk names of the cloned VM. When you create a hot clone of a VM that has one or more snapshots, the delta disk names of the source VM are retained in the cloned VM
  • vCenter Server service (vpxd) might fail during a virtual machine power on operation in a Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) cluster.

ESXi:

  • Hostd might stop responding when you execute esxcli commands using PowerCLI resulting in memory leaks and memory consumption exceeding the hard limit.
  • ESXi mClock I/O scheduler does not work as expected. The ESXi mClock I/O scheduler does not limit the I/Os with a lesser load even after you change the IOPS of the VM using the vSphere Client.
  • After you upgrade Virtual SAN environment to ESXi 6.0 Update 1b, the vCenter Server reports a false warning similar to the following in the Summary tab in the vSphere Web Client and the ESXi host shows a notification triangle
  • Attempts to perform vMotion might fail after you upgrade from ESXi 5.0 or 5.1 to 6.0 Update 1 or later releases. An error message similar to the following is written to the vmware.log file.
  • Virtual machine performance metrics are not displayed correctly as the performance counter cpu.system.summation for a VM is always displayed as 0
  • Attempts to perform vMotion with ESXi 6.0 virtual machines that have two 2 TB virtual disks created on ESXi 5.0 fail with an error messages similar to the following logged in the vpxd.log file:2015-09-28T10:00:28.721+09:00 info vpxd[xxxxx] [Originator@6876 sub=vpxLro opID=xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-xx] [VpxLRO] — BEGIN task-919 — vm-281 — vim.VirtualMachine.relocate — xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx(xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx)

The mClock fix highlighted above is a significant fix for those that where looking to use IOPS limiting. It’s basically been broken since 5.5 Update 2 and also impacts/changes the way in which you would think IOPS are interpreted through the VM to storage stack. For service providers looking to introduce IOPS limited to control the impact noisy neighbors the fix is welcomed.

As usual there are still a lot of known issues and some that have been added or updated to the release notes since release date. Overall the early noise coming out from the community is that this Update 2 release is relatively solid and there have been improvements in network performance and general overall stability. Hopefully we don’t see a repeat of the 5.5 Update 2 issues or the more recent bug problems that have plagued previous released…and hopefully not more CBT issues!

vSphere 6.0 Update 2 has a lot of goodness for Service Providers and continues of offer the number one vitalization platform from which to build managed and hosted services on top of. Go grab it now and put it through it’s paces before pushing to production!

References:

http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/vsphere/60/vsphere-esxi-60u2-release-notes.html

http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/vsphere/60/vsphere-vcenter-server-60u2-release-notes.html

http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/vsan/62/vmware-virtual-san-62-release-notes.html

http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/vsphere/60/vmware-host-client-10-release-notes.html