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With all of the hullabaloo around the licensing issue in 3.5 Update 2, some people might have missed the fact that there have been some really neat improvements in the product.

One of my pet irritations is that a lot of environments have dysfunctional DNS. In the past, this has caused HA to break, unless we put entries in the hosts files of the ESX hosts and the VirtualCenter host. Starting with ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2, DNS resolution or /etc/hosts file entries are no longer required to configure VMware HA. It’s now down to VirtualCenter to do that for you. This is no excuse to not have functioning DNS in place, but it does make situations where the ESX environment is the first thing going in a little more palatable.

The Remote Command Line Interface (Remote CLI), which was previously supported only on ESXi (with support for ESX only in conjunction with Storage VMotion), is now fully supported for both ESXi 3.5 Update 2 and ESX 3.5 Update 2.

As of ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2, VMware now supports up to 192 logical (virtual) CPUs per host, provided the host has no more than 170 VMs, and there are no more than three virtual floppy devices or virtual CDROM devices configured on the host at any given time. This is cool, although unfortunately it’s not something I’ve had time to test in the lab.

Hot virtual disk extension support has been added to this release, which makes the CLI-averse a little more comfortable with virtual disk expansion. Hot extend is supported for monolithic disks in VMFS that do not have a VM snapshot.

So, there are some cool things, besides the obvious boneheaded error mentioned previously. But don’t get too excited, as I noticed that VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 3 has just been released. Get it here and have a look through the release notes here. This release seems to focus on resolving issues, of which there are many in VirtualCenter, and this is no bad thing. There is a FLEX license server upgrade included, but (and I imagine they’ve poached coders from Sun for this functionality) “the license server will not be automatically upgraded when using the VMware Infrastructure Management Installer to upgrade an existing installation”. No, that would be too easy. There’s a standalone installer instead. Hopefully this will decrease the number of license server calls I get, but it’s still running FLEX isn’t it?

There’s still a lot of issues, but it wouldn’t be enterprise software without that, now, would it? things like “Storage Devices Connected to McData FC Switch Through QLogic Adapters Occasionally Do Not Reappear After Reboot“, “Incorrect Device Paths for LUNs Displayed in Storage Summary“, “ESX Server Host Might Lose Access to iSCSI Targets from EMC CX3 Series Array“, and so on. The sort of stuff that might just do your head in if you don’t have relaxation strategies in place. And upgrading VMware Update Manager is still hinky, while the whole experience, new install or upgrade, reeks of components slapped together rather than “unified”. But it’s a reasonably complicated product, and I’m no software engineer, so I can live with it. Enjoy.