vSphere 4 update 1 released last night

vSphere 4 update 1 released.

Just saw the news on Jason’s site. It’s the long time awaited vSphere 4 update 1 which has been released last night. But not only. Together with ESX 4, ESXi 4 and vCenter Server there are updates available for other products, to insure the compatibility and reliability. For example VMware Data Recovery (VDR), which goes to version 1.1. See release notes here.

VDR is now officialy supporting FLR (file level restore) from Windows VMs only for now… -:). The first release was only experimental. It worked great already (see the video). The FLR for linux VMs will be supported in one of the next releases, I guess.

File Level Restore Functionality is Officially SupportedFile Level Restore (FLR) provides a way to access individual files within restore points for Windows virtual machines. In previous versions of Data Recovery, FLR was provided as an experimental feature. File Level Restore feature is now officially supported.

Integrity Check Stability and Performance ImprovedThe integrity check process is faster and more stable. Note that integrity checks are computationally intensive processes and can take significant periods of time. The exact amount of time integrity checks take varies based on of the size of the deduplication store. Even with these enhancements, integrity checks that take several hours are not unexpected.

Integrity Checks Provides Improved Progress InformationWhen an integrity check is running, a progress indicator is displayed. This progress indicator has been improved, although it does not provide the optimal level of detail.

Enhanced CIFS Shares Support

vCenter, ESX 4 and ESXi 4 U1 updates:

• The long awaited fix for VI client not executing properly under Windows 7 and Windows 2008 Server R2. The workaround was published as a KB few days ago. Now it’s finally fixed with Update 1.
• View 4 support – together with the new protocol PCoIP which delivers a high performance desktop experience, even over high latency and low bandwidth connections.
• DB2 database back end support
• Paravirtualized SCSI support (PVSCSI)is now supported on Windows 2003 and 2008 hosts as a boot drives. Previously VMware supported PVSCSI only for some guests on Data drives (not system drives) and in certain conditions. PvSCSI greatly enhances a speed and uses less CPU.
• New pre-upgrade checker tool that will help you to confirm (or not) if your environment is fine for an upgrade to update 1 by checking for any potential issues in upgrading the vCenter agents.
• Enhanced Clustering Support for Microsoft Windows – Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) for Windows 2000 and 2003 and Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering is now supported on an VMware High Availability (HA) and Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS) cluster in a limited configuration.
• Improved vNetwork Distributed Switch Performance.
• Increase in vCPU per Core Limit – The limit on vCPUs per core has been increased from 20 to 25. This change raises the supported limit only. It does not include any additional performance optimizations.
• Support of  Intel Xeon Processor 3400 Series.
• There has been many bug fixes and also there are other features too..

Get all those updates from here:

• ESX 4.0 U 1: - and see the release note from here
• ESXi 4.0 U 1 - and see the release note from here
• vCenter 4.0 U 1 – and see the release note from here

Also the automation tools for vSphere 4 has been updated yesterday:

• vSphere PowerCLI 4.0 U1 – and see the release notes here.
• VMware vSphere CLI 4.0 U1

Also some important note:

“Future releases of VMware vCenter Server might not support installation on 32-bit Windows operating systems. VMware recommends installing vCenter Server on a 64-bit Windows operating system. If you have VirtualCenter 2.x installed, see the vSphere Upgrade Guide for instructions on installing vCenter Server on a 64-bit operating system and preserving your VirtualCenter database.”

Technorati Tags: ESX 4 update 1, VMware vSphere 4 update 1, vSphere update

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