VMware vSphere 4 Install

Finished up the majority of the work to upgrade our main data center from VMware ESX 3.5u4 to vSphere 4.0 last night (and early this morning). Just some quicky notes about the experience:

• We somehow ended up with a per-server VMFS partition that contains the esxconsole guest. Dunno whether we missed something during the install, or whether it's supposed to work like this.


• We completed the upgrade on release day, installing on two hosts connected to a FC SAN.


• Had problems using either Update Manager or manual installations of the VMware Tools on all of our Windows 2008 guests. 32-bit and 64-bit, Standard and Enterprise all had weird Windows Installer failures that caused us to "force remove" the old package before installing the new versions. We copied the Tools installer package to a temp directory, ran "setup /c" to forcibly remove the old one, then ran "setup" to install the new ones. Windows XP, 2003 and CentOS 4 and 5 all worked fine without any weird hangups.


• Upgrading the Virtual Hardware took a little bit to figure out how to accomplish. VMware's got a good video about how to do it, but the menu item doesn't show up for the guest until you shut down the machine. Would be better if the choice was simply grayed out so you knew it was there but unavailable while the guest was running.


• Upgrading the Virtual Hardware seems to take non-C: drive disks offline on Windows. They're easy enough to bring back online, but it's a little freaky to see they're gone and hope to hell you didn't just toast the corporate Exchange Mailboxes.


• Update Manager install and configuration was quick and easy, it's the first time we'll use it. We only set it up for VMware updates, we use WSUS for Windows updates and do the Linux updates by hand.


• Had to call VMware to get our licensing straightened out. Dunno what the issue was, but the Indian call center handled it quickly and we're ready to do the other data center once other issues get worked out.


• Looks like vSphere 4 does a little better on memory overcommits. Total memory usage was around 30GB/server on the old version, about 22GB on the new one.


• Distributed Power Management is no longer experimental. We've used it all along, never had issues with it. vSphere seems to want to talk to the HP ILO boards to do the power management in the new version, which is different than just doing Wake-on-LAN like the previous version. Seems to work just fine, though.


• Veeam Backup 3.0.1 doesn't like vSphere 4.0. We ended up turning off the VSS support on the backup jobs in Veeam to get them to run without warning. They're saying an update should be available in a couple weeks.


• Installation of vSphere on the hosts is quick and painless. We did it using an ISO connected to the Virtual Media applet of the ILO boards on our HP DL380 G5's. Using the Virtual Media applet slows things down a little, but I didn't feel like dealing with burning a CD.


• Overall, good stuff!