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Posts Tagged ‘vSphere 4.1’

The issue mentioned in one of my previous blogposts (see ESXi and EMC CLARiiON registration issue) now has a workaround! The problem is that the host profiles of vSphere mix up the vmk0 and vmk1 interfaces, after which the CLARiiON tries to communicate through the wrong VMkernel interface with ESXi.

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I just spotted something that had not occurred to me yet… A small new detail in vSphere 4.1 (or I just missed out on it previously)… VMware has had this “problem” for a long time: If you added a second virtual disk to a virtual machine on a datastore different from the location of the first virtual disk, vSphere used to name that new virtual disk the same as the base disk. Well not any more!

I noticed in vSphere 4.1 that this is no longer true. A second disk created on a separate datastore gets its name from the virtual machine (like it used to be), but with a trailing “_1” in the filename.

For a long time backup vendors have been battling with this “issue” because the backup software ended up with two virtual disks that were both named the same… In a lot of environments that meant manual renaming and remounting second and third disks to VMs in order to get proper backups without having to guess which disk goes where.

Amazing that these things all of a sudden get fixed now that VMware has its own backup solution 😉

PHDVirtual has released an updated version of their famous Virtual Backup solution (formerly esXpress). This version fully supports VMware vSphere 4.1, and is one of the first (if not THE first) of the 3rd party “high tech virtual backup only” to support vSphere 4.1

I was very quick into upgrading my test environment to vSphere 4.1 (right after the general release), breaking the PHDvirtual backup in the process. For days the environment failed to backup, because vSphere 4.1 introduced a snapshot issue with esXpress. PHDvirtual worked hard to get vSphere 4.1 supported, and on 9/17/2010 they released version 4.0-4 which did just that.

So I upgraded my test environment to PHDvirtual 4.0-4. Right after the upgrade I forced a reinstall on the ESX nodes to 4.0-4 from the 4.0-4 GUI appliance, and I kicked of an initial backup by renaming a VM from the VI client to include [xPHDD] in the VM name. PHDvirtual Backup picked it up, renamed the VM back and commenced performing the backup. It just worked straight away. Even CBT was still functional, and my first Windows VM backed up again with only 2.2[GB] in changed blocks. Awesome!

From the initial tests it shows that both speed and stability are just fine, not very different from the previous release. Still fast and definitely rock solid. Highly recommended!