VI 3.5 Update 1 Release Date - April 10th

Someone slipped up earlier today and posted links to ESX 3.5 Update 1, ESX 3i Update 1 and VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 1 on the VMware downloads page (there was nothing actually available for download though). Presumably that person thought the world runs on California time or something, as the links disappeared a short time later.



Anyway, April 10th looks to be the release date for Update 1 so if you're planning anything significant in the near future, might be worth holding off to see exactly what is included in the update.

I just noticed that 3i has a name change to ESXi in that screenshot too... good to see the marketers getting their share of this release (assuming it's not a typo)!

ESX 3i - Almost, but not quite there yet

What a contentious title for a post, however I couldn't help but notice how many times I saw / heard "not supported in 3i" during VMworld Europe 2008, despite the significant keynote time given to IBM, HP and Dell who all duly announced you could get 3i on a USB stick with their hardware now!

Sure many of the things are relatively minor, but the biggest concerns for me are:

- HA is only experimental (no I'm not kidding)
- No advanced networking support that is found in 3.5 (TSO, Jumbo Frames)
- No Infiniband support that is found in 3.5

Ordinarily I wouldnt really care, but the marketing ppl at VMware would have us believe that the 2 products are identical except for the lack of a service console. As they say, the 2 kernels are identical, except when they're not. One could argue that the benefits of no service console outweigh the limitations above, but as bullish as I was on 3i when I first saw it in the beta program, I just can't justify deploying it in it's current state.

Mind you, I believe absolutely that 3i is the way of the future, and will continue to work on that stateless infrastructure I mentioned a few weeks back... which reminds me, I should get to work on that stateless infrastructure I mentioned a few weeks back!

VirtualCenter 2.5 Database Changes

It's no surprise that the database schema and stored procs have undergone a significant overhaul in VC 2.5, but for me some of the kep improvements is with regards to the statistics collection levels.

In VC 2.0.x the statistics collection level was a single global setting, with Level 1 being the default and VMware recommending that anything above Level 2 was used purely for diagnostic purposes.

But with 2.5, the stats collection levels can be configured per rollup period, which is great! So the recommendation now is to use Level 3 for Daily and Weekly rollups, and Level 1 for monthly and yearly. That makes it easy to do reporting on things like CPU Ready Time without needing tera's of disk for data that is pretty much useless after a week.

Hi Dennis :-)

I had the pleasure of meeting Dennis Zimmer at VMworld Europe (thanks for the introduction Roland ;-), author of several books and the guy behind the biggest virtualisation site in Germany (no English translation for the site yet, but he assures me it's coming - several of his books are in English however so don't be afraid to pick them up from Amazon).

I also finally got to meet Mike Laverick in person (identified him by voice when he asked a question during the Site Recovery Manager deep dive session :-D) and met some other cool people too, as well as have a dinner with a few product managers at VMware which was great. I think easily the biggest benefit from conferences are these kinds of opportunities, and encourage anyone to make the most of any time outside of the sessions by talking to a product manager or even a complete stranger!