vSphere 4.0 Update 1: Seven Improvements In Internal Clouds

Deploying internal clouds got a bit easier last week as VMware introduced vSphere 4.0 Update 1. Among the enhancements to VMware's cloud-computing OS are the support for 2008 R2 servers and numerous performance tweaks.

Announced last April, vSphere 4 is VMware's solution for managing large sets of virtual machines. The software allows enterprises to turn x86 servers into an internal cloud of systems. In this fashion, vSphere 4 enables data centers to respond to fluctuating workload requirements. Should the load on a server suddenly spike, vSphere can then utilize services in the private or public clouds.

The initial vSphere implementation could manage up to 1,280 virtual machines across 32 servers equipped with up to 65 cores and 32 TB of RAM. At the same time, the initial release fell short in seven areas addressed in the Update 1 introduction.

The first release neglected Windows 7 support and Windows 2008 R2 support. vSphere couldn't run virtualized 2008 servers (e.g. as a guest OS) while Windows 7 clients were unable to easily run the vSphere 4 management interface, the vSphere client. The new release adds support for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and 64-bit version of Windows 2008 R2 as guest OS platforms.

The 4.0 release of vSphere introduced support of Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) with Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 Failover Clustering, but it didn't support high availability environments. In Update 1, MSCS and 2008 Failover Clustering can run on VMware High Availability (HA) and Dynamic Resources Scheduler (DRS) for individual VMs or the entire host. Still, there are a number of known deficiencies including the lack of support for iSCSI or NFS disks. High storage environments performance was improved in 4.0 with the introduction of Paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI) adapters for Windows 2003 and 2008 guest OSes. However, enterprises still needed to designate a physical adapter for the boot disk. In Update 1, VMware has added PVCSCSI support for boot disks although PVSCSI adapters still do not support a number of features, including record/replay, fault tolerance and MSCS clustering. Floppy disk images are also available containing the driver for use during the Windows installation. 

Organizations were limited in the number of virtual CPUs (vCPUs) could be run in a given core in vSphere 4. Under the new release, the restrictions on the number of vCPUs have been increased from 20 to 25 vCPUs per core. While VMware increased the number of vCPUs, no such change has occurred elsewhere in the virtualized server. Administrators will be able to ensure the additional servers to organize their servers, particularly where applications require their own VM, but don't expect additional performance.

VMware made several performance and usability improvements in its virtual Distributed Switch (vDS) architecture. Performance is better when making configuration changes to a vDS instance in a heavily loaded ESX/ESXi host. There is also Improved performance when adding or removing an ESX/ESXi host to or from a vDS instance

VMware also modernized vSphere, adding support for Intel's Xeon 3400 series processor. Update 1 fixes a number of bugs found in 4.0 in a dozen different areas. Some of these fixes include VMs that would fail when hardware acceleration was fully enabled and a number changes impacting Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) support affecting vSphere in use in some Cisco environments.