More vSphere 4.1 Enhancements – Welcome Back PVSCSI Driver!
As I keep digging into documents and KB articles I keep finding more and more things to like about vSphere 4.1. Today's find has to do with the PVSCSI driver.
With the release of vSphere 4.0, VMware added a new paravirtualized SCSI driver into the VMware Tools that provides better virtual disk performance than the standard LSI driver. The PVSCSI driver promised to deliver better performance and lower overall CPU utilization for workloads that had high I/O demands. Unfortunately the PVSCSI driver wasn't supported on virtual machine boot volumes, so folks held off on making this the default SCSI driver for all virtual machines.
After vSphere 4 Update 1 was released, VMware lifted the restriction and now supported the PVSCSI driver on boot volumes. Folks began considering adopting the PVSCSI driver in all virtual machines similar to how the VMXNET driver is a standard for nearly all virtual NICs. Soon afterwards VMware came out with a knowledgebase article stating that virtual machines that did not have heavy I/O demands could actually experience worse performance using the PVSCSI driver. They recommended only using the driver for workloads that had I/O demands in excess of 2,000 IOPS.
With the release of vSphere 4.1 that is no longer a problem and you can use the PVSCSI driver in all circumstances. Want details? Read on!
Nice Addition to vSphere 4.1 Enterprise License
When vSphere 4.1 was released a lot of people were talking about all of the amazing new features available in the product. Along with introducing many new features, VMware also shuffled around some existing features into different license levels. The one that got the most press was that vMotion was now available in vSphere Standard as well as the Essentials Plus bundle.
In my opinion one of the biggest changes isn't being talked about much at all. In vSphere 4.1, VMware has made the use of 3rd party multipathing plug-ins available in vSphere Enterprise edition and higher. In vSphere 4 this was only available in the Enterprise Plus license, making it out of reach for smaller customers.
This link compares the features available in vSphere 4.1 and it states that vStorage APIs for Multipathing are supported in both Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. Multipathing plug-ins like EMC's PowerPath/VE and Dell's new EqualLogic Multipathing Extension Module allow you to have better integration and control over multipathing than VMware's native multipathing plugins. I challenge you to say multipathing more times in one sentence than I just did.
The other really important point about VMware making this feature available in the Enterprise license is the likelihood that the Enterprise license will persist going forward. VMware had originally planned on phasing out the Enterprise license in favor of Enterprise Plus but backed down on that plan after customer complaints. They stated at the time that they expected sales of Enterprise to decrease over time as customers purchased Enterprise Plus. Taking a feature from Enterprise Plus and making it available in Enterprise shows, at least to me, a commitment to keep that license level around for the foreseeable future.
vMotion of clustered VMs is supported in vSphere 4.1..or is it?
While looking over some of the new vSphere 4.1 documentation I noticed that VMware had updated their Setup for Failover Clustering and Microsoft Cluster Service document. As clustering becomes a bigger component of Microsoft's enterprise applications, support for clustering in vSphere becomes even more important.
As in previous versions of this document they list the limitations for clustering on vSphere. The list of limitation is below:
The following environments and functions are not supported for MSCS setups with this release of vSphere:
Migration with vMotion of clustered virtual machines.
Issues updating VMware Tools with Update Manager
I recently updated a lab environment to vSphere 4 Update 2 and wanted to upgrade VMware Tools on several VMs at once. I decided to use Update Manager to push out the VMware Tools update, and during the process discovered an issue between Update Manager and newer versions of Windows. I didn't try any of the following with vSphere 4.1.
I remediated a folder of about seven VMs and to my surprise I saw that only a few of them actually updated. The others simply sat there and never updated the tools, rebooted, or did much of anything. Sorting the folder by Guest OS I noticed something - all of the VMs that did not update were running either Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7.
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