Last week after an extended period of development and beta testing VMware released vSphere 6.5. This is a lot more than a point release and is a major major upgrade from vSphere 6.0. In fact, there is so much packed into this new release that there is an official whitepaper listing all the features and enhancements that […] Read More
vSphere 6 Update 2 – Whats In It for Service Providers
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 […] Read More
Heads Up: Heavy VXLAN Traffic Causing Broadcom 10GB NICS to Drop
For the last couple of weeks we have had some intermittent issues where by ESXi network adapters have gone into a disconnected state requiring a host reboot to bring the link back online. Generally it was only one NIC at a time, but in some circumstances both NICs went offline resulting in host failure and […] Read More
vSphere 5.5 Update 3 Released: Features and Top Fixes
vSphere 5.5 Update 3 was released earlier today and there are a bunch of bug fixes and feature improvements in this update release for both vCenter and ESXi. For most Service Providers updating to vSphere 6.0 is still a while away so it’s good to have continued support and improvement for the 5.5 platform. I’ve […] Read More
Leap Second Bug: Worth a Double Check…
In 2008 I vividly remember the impact that leap year/day/seconds can have on systems that are not prepared to handle the changes in time or date. It was the 29th of February and at the time I was working for a Service Provider offering Hosted Exchange services based on Exchange 2007. All off a sudden […] Read More
Quick Post: One Stop Shop for ESXi Driver Downloads
Today I needed to update an Emulex NIC Driver for an new host that I installed using the VMware ESXi 5.5 Update 2 base image. I needed to chase up the latest OEM update bundle for the elxnet drivers… Generally sourcing these driver bundles can be a bit of a pain but I remembered a conversation I […] Read More
January vCenter and ESXi 5.5 Patch Releases: Critical CBT Bug Fixed
VMware released new builds for vCenter and ESXi 5.5 today. The builds contain mostly bug fixes, but I wanted to point out one fix that had affected those who use CBT as part of their VM backup strategy. Veeam users where initially affected by the bug…though Veeam released a work around in subsequent Veeam 8 builds this […] Read More
ESXi 5.5: IOPS Limit and mClock scheduler
It’s fair to say that it’s not very often the difference between a 1 and 0 can have such a massive impact on performance…I had read a couple of posts from Duncan Epping in regards to a new DiskIO Schedular introduced in ESXi 5.5 and what it meant for VM Disk Limits compared to how […] Read More
ESXi 5.5 Update 2: vMotion Fails at 14% with Stale Admission Control and VM Reservations
We are currently in the process of upgrading all of our vCenter Clusters from ESXi 5.1 to 5.5 Update 2 and have come across a bug whereby the vMotion of VMs from the 5.1 hosts to the 5.5 hosts fails at 14% with the following error: [UPDATE 6/10] – Observed Conditions: vCenter 5.5 U1/2 (U2 […] Read More
ESXi 5.x NFS IOPS Limit Bug – Latency and Performance Hit
There is another NFS bug hidden in the latest ESXi 5.x releases…while not as severe as the 5.5 Update 1 NFS Bug it’s been the cause of increased Virtual Disk Latency and Overall Poor VM performance across a couple of the environments I manage. The VMwareKB Article referencing the bug can be found here: Symptoms […] Read More