Comments on: VMware vSphere 4.0 Update1 “A”

By: Mike Laverick

Mike Laverick — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:48:48 +0000

Well, I never really did conclusively get to the bottom of my network problems. Although have appeared for the moment to “go away”. Yeah, I don’t you just love it when a problem randomly resolves itself – and your clueless to why. But a couple of points. Firstly, I’m still running on Update 1(a) – and I’m not convinced that U1(a) was the source of the problem. Secondly, I was using vmxnet on W2K3-32-Enterprize on a physical switch that wouldn’t support any of the advanced features – I’ve rolled back to using the ‘Flexible’ vmxnet driver – and that did NOT appear to be a killer. I’ve heard tales in the Linux world that the vmxnet3 driver caused problems. Thirdly, I team my NICs using “originating port ID”. This is meant to be ultra-compatible with any pSwitch configuration which is a must for me because I have the cheapest netgear gigabit switch in my lab environment. Occasionally, I split the NICs across two of these netgears simply because I’ve run out of ports. In the past (3.5) this didn’t cause a problem – and is of course best practise. Switching to a single vSwitch with single vmnic seems to have made things much better. SO… now I’m wondering if it is pSwitch that’s the problem or fault nic – causing an intermittent network outage… Putting my virtual dc, vc, sql, srm all on the same vSwitch has helped – because well, then there is no physical layer to worry about (except when the two SRM/VC’s need to chat to each other).

In short there doesn’t appear to be any reason – and the fact the problem disappeared isn’t one that reassures me it won’t come back again. I’m investing in single pSwitch that’s 48 ports to see if it is indeed a physical problem…

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:02:46 +0000

Mike, were you ever able to attribute your SRM issues to Update 1. We’re working on an SRM 4 and U1 deployment and having very strange connectivity issues. We get disconnected repeatedly from the remote SRM server.

Thanks!

By: John

John — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:31:45 +0000

Had a similar problem. We didn’t upgrade our vSphere to U1 but left it at release build. All my ESXi hosts were fine with no management agents on them. Everything looked good until after the reboot -

8 hosts running ESXi (latest and greatest) showed up in vSphere as 3.5 hosts (of assorted builds). vSphere tried to install ESX agents on ESXi hosts – not a good choice.

6 hours with vmware support and do you know what fixed it? Timing reboots of the host with vSphere service restarts. I call that getting lucky

By: View 4 & PCoIP – a few problems « VM Junkie

View 4 & PCoIP – a few problems « VM Junkie — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 05:18:37 +0000

[...] are pretty rough edges. Add that to a lot of the issues with vSphere Update 1 (well documented by Mike Laverick) and it looks to me like View 4 really was released too [...]