VMware ESXi 5. 0 Update 2 Release Notes ESXi 5. Update 2 2. 0 DEC 2. Build 9. 14. 58. 6 Last updated 0. JULY 2. 01. 4Whats in the Release Notes. Esxcli Software Vib Install Nexus 1000V' title='Esxcli Software Vib Install Nexus 1000V' />These release notes cover the following topics. Whats New. The following information describes some of the enhancements available in this release of VMware ESXi Support for additional guest operating systems. This release adds support for Solaris 1. Solaris 1. 1. 1, and Mac OS X Server Lion 1. For a complete list of guest operating systems supported with this release, see the VMware Compatibility Guide. Resolved Issues. This release delivers a number of bug fixes that have been documented in the Resolved Issues section. This Cisco Validated Design prescribes a defined set of hardware and software that serves as an integrated foundation for both VMware Horizon RDSH server desktop. A great new feature of vSphere 5 is the possibility to run ESXi stateless. Long, long time ago when ESX 3. ESX on the local harddisk. VMware vSphere on HP ProLiant Server How to update online firmware and drivers using Service Pack SPPEarlier Releases of ESXi 5. Features and known issues of ESXi 5. To view release notes for earlier releases of ESXi 5. Internationalization. VMware v. Sphere 5. Update 2 is available in the following languages English. French. German. Japanese. Korean. Simplified Chinesev. Sphere Client Locale Forcing Mode. With v. Sphere 5. VMware is the global leader in virtualization software, providing desktop and server virtualization products for virtual infrastructure solutions. Update 2, you can configure the VMware v. Sphere Client to provide the interface text in English even when the machine on which it is running is not English. You can set this configuration for the duration of a single session by supplying a command line switch. This configuration applies to the interface text and does not affect other locale related settings such as date and time or numeric formatting. The following v. Sphere Client command causes the individual session to appear in English vpx. Client locale enUSCompatibility and Installation. ESXi, v. Center Server, and v. Sphere Client Version Compatibility. The VMware Product Interoperability Matrix provides details about the compatibility of current and previous versions of VMware v. Sphere components, including ESXi, VMware v. Center Server, the v. Sphere Client, and optional VMware products. In addition, check this site for information about supported management and backup agents before installing ESXi or v. Center Server. The v. Sphere Web Client and the v. Sphere Client are packaged with the v. Center Server and modules ZIP file. You can install one or both clients from the VMware v. Center Installer wizard. Microsoft Ehome Media Center. ESXi, v. Center Server, and VDDK Compatibility. Virtual Disk Development Kit VDDK 5. ESXi 5. 0 Update 2 and v. Center Server 5. 0 Update 2 releases. For more information about VDDK, see http www. Hardware Compatibility for ESXi. To determine which processors, storage devices, SAN arrays, and IO devices are compatible. Sphere 5. 0 Update 2, use the ESXi 5. Update 2 information in the. VMware Compatibility Guide. Upgrades and Installations for supported CPUs. Sphere 5. 0 Update 2 supports only CPUs that have LAHF and SAHF CPU instruction sets. During an installation or upgrade, the installer checks the compatibility of the host CPU with v. Sphere 5. 0 Update 2. For CPU support, see the. VMware Compatibility Guide. Guest Operating System Compatibility for ESXi. To determine which guest operating systems are compatible with v. Sphere 5. 0 Update 2, use the ESXi 5. Update 2 information in the VMware Compatibility Guide. Virtual Machine Compatibility for ESXi. Virtual machines with virtual hardware versions 4. ESXi 5. 0 Update 2. Hardware version 3 is no longer supported. To use hardware version 3 virtual machines on ESXi 5. Update 2, upgrade virtual hardware. See the v. Sphere Upgrade documentation. Installation Notes for This Release. Read the v. Sphere Installation and Setup documentation for step by step guidance on installing and configuring ESXi and v. Center Server. After successful installation, you must perform some licensing, networking, and security configuration. For information about these configuration tasks, see the following guides in the v. Sphere documentation. Migrating Third Party Solutions. ESXESXi hosts might contain third party software, such as Cisco Nexus 1. V VEMs or EMC Power. Path modules. The ESXi 5. ESXESXi 4. x so that customized third party software packages VIBs cannot be migrated when you upgrade from ESXESXi 4. ESXi 5. 0 and later. When you upgrade a 4. VIBs that are not in the upgrade ISO, you can proceed with the upgrade but will receive an error message listing the missing VIBs. To upgrade or migrate such hosts successfully, you must use Image Builder to create a custom ESXi ISO image that includes the missing VIBs. To upgrade without including the third party software, use the Force. Migrate option or select the option to remove third party software modules during the remediation process in v. Sphere Update Manager. For information about how to use Image Builder to make a custom ISO, see the v. Sphere Installation and Setup documentation. For information about upgrading with third party customizations, see the v. Sphere Upgrade and Installing and Administering VMware v. Sphere Update Manager documentation. For. information about upgrading with v. Sphere Update Manager, see the v. Sphere Upgrade and Installing and Administering VMware v. Sphere Update Manager documentation. L3 routed NFS Storage Access. Sphere 5. 0 Update 2 supports L3 routed NFS storage access when your environment meets the following conditions Use Ciscos Hot Standby Router Protocol HSRP in IP Router. If you are using a non Cisco router, be sure to use Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol VRRP instead. Use Quality of Service Qo. S to prioritize NFS L3 traffic on networks with limited bandwidths, or on networks that experience congestion. See your router documentation for details. Follow Routed NFS L3 best practices recommended by your storage vendor. Contact your storage vendor for details. Disable Network IO Resource Management Net. IORMIf you are planning to use systems with top of rack switches or switch dependent IO device partitioning, contact your system vendor for compatibility and support. In an L3 environment the following additional restrictions are applicable. The environment does not support VMware Site Recovery Manager. The environment supports only NFS protocol. Do not use other storage protocols such as FCo. E over the same physical network. The NFS traffic in this environment does not support IPv. The NFS traffic in this environment can be routed only over a LAN. Other environments such as WAN are not supported. The environment does not support Distributed Virtual Switch DVS. Upgrades for This Release. For instructions about how to upgrade v. Center Server and ESXi hosts, see the v. Sphere Upgrade documentation. Upgrading VMware Tools. VMware ESXi 5. 0 Update 2 contains the latest version of VMware Tools. VMware Tools is a suite of utilities that enhances the performance of the virtual machines guest operating system. Refer to the VMware Tools Resolved Issues for a list of issues resolved in this release of ESX related to VMware Tools. To determine an installed VMware Tools version, see Verifying a VMware Tools build version KB 1. ESXESXi Upgrades. You can upgrade ESXESXi hosts to ESXi 5. Update 2 in several ways. Sphere Update Manager. If your site uses v. Center Server, use v. Sphere Update Manager to perform an orchestrated host upgrade or an orchestrated virtual machine upgrade from ESXESXi 4. ESXi 5. 0. See the instructions in the v. Sphere Upgrade documentation, or for complete documentation about v. Sphere Update Manager, see the Installing and Administering VMware v. Sphere Update Manager documentation. Upgrade interactively using an ESXi installer ISO image on CD ROM or DVD. You can run the ESXi 5. Sphere 5 How to run ESXi stateless with v. Sphere Auto Deploy. A great new feature of v. Sphere 5 is the possibility to run ESXi stateless. Long, long time ago when ESX 3. ESX on the local harddisk or SAN disk. With ESX 3. 5, the first ESXi version was released but only few were using it. With 4. x ESXi really got a large install base and more and more people were moving to installing ESXi on USB or SD card. Now with v. Sphere 5 and ESXi as the only hypervisor no more ESX, we dont need to install ESXi at all. When running ESXi stateless, the host will PXE boot and load an ESXi image into memory. There is no more need to have local disks, SD card or USB on your host. Another advantage is that you can now switch the ESXi version the host is running by just rebooting or refresh the host configuration with a reboot. Adding new ESXi hosts to your cluster has become a task of just a few minutes. Lets have a look at how to configure auto deploy. This blog post will take you through the steps of setting up the required infrastructure and prepare an image and deploy it to a host. My series on VMware v. Sphere 5 Auto Deploy v. Sphere 5 How to run ESXi stateless with v. Sphere Auto Deployv. Sphere 5 Auto Deploy PXE booting through Cisco ASA firewall. Updating your ESXi host using VMware v. Sphere 5 Auto deploy. My first Auto Deploy design for real production environment. Important When running stateless, your ESXi host cannot boot without all v. Center Auto Deploy components being active. Changes are big that your v. Center Auto Deploy is running in a virtual machine. Should your whole environment power down, you will have a problem getting everything running again. Personally Im thinking of having an extra USB install of ESXi 5 at hand at all times. Just in case. The bigger the environment the smaller the chance this will happen. But especially for some home lab environments this might be something to think about. Infrastructure. When using Auto Deploy a host will use DHCP to get an IP address and learn if there is a PXE boot server. The PXE boot image is downloaded and the pre boot environment is ran on the host. It will now contact the Auto Deploy server which will now check the rule engine. Based on the rules in the rule engine an image is now offered to the host and a host profile is applied to the host. An image is based on a VMware ESXi deployment image combined with optional extra VIBs VMware Image Bundles. You can download a ready to deploy image of ESXi from the VMware download site, just like you would download your normal ESXi install files. For example the latest ESXi version I could download in the beta, was build 4. The normal ESXi install to download would be VMware VMvisor Installer 5. VMware ESXi 5. 0. This is an ESXi image suited for auto deploy, containing the ESXi VIB. Software Wifi Repeater there. It is also possible to combine VIBs into a new image if needed, for example when you want to add extra drivers or special VIB supplied by the hardware manufacturer. Another component is the Image Builder Power. CLI. Using Power. CLI commands a rule set is created and together with a host profile connected to a host or number of hosts. To make all this possible you need to have the following in your environment Hosts that are capable of running ESXi 5. TFPT boot server. DHCP DNS server. Windows server to run Auto Deploy or v. Sphere v. Center Appliancev. Sphere Power. CLIThe v. Center Auto Deploy manual will show you how to enable the v. Sphere v. Center Appliance for Auto Deploy. In this post I will use a Windows server to act as TFTP and Auto Deploy server. Installing TFTP server. To keep things simple I downloaded the Win. Agents TFTP server. It is a 3. 0 day trial. Installation is a simple next, next, finish. Create a directory on your Windows server, for example E tftproot and make this your TFTP root directory. Set up DHCPTo be able to PXE boot, you need to set some options in your DHCP scope. Open the scope on your DHCP server and add the following options 0. Boot server host name   lt ip of your TFTP PXE boot server. Boot file name undionly. Set up v. Sphere Auto Deploy. On the v. Center installation media youll find the Auto Deploy software. It can be installed on your v. Center server but you can also run it on a separate Windows server and have it point to your v. Center server. I kept everything, including the TFTP server, on my v. Center host. Installation again is a simple next, next, finish in which you only need to supply the IP of the v. Center server and the correct credentials. After the installation has finished you can install a plug in in your v. Sphere Infrastructure Client. You can see the Auto Deploy icon on the home tab. Install TFTP boot image. The last step is now to add a boot image to your TFTP server root directory. In the v. Sphere client click the Auto Deploy plug in and see the following page Now choose to download the TFTP Boot Zip and extract this ZIP file into your TFTP root directory. With this, the first part is ready. To test if things are working, you can boot an ESXi host or just for test boot a VM. Make sure that the host or VM is using PXE boot. You should see that it is assigned an IP address and it starts loading a TFTP image. Next youll see that although a TFTP image was loaded, there was no ESXi image associated with this host. This screen also displays a number of Machine attributes we could use later on when tying a rule set to a host. Installing v. Sphere Power. CLIWell this should be a piece of cake since I expect many of you to have done this many times before. Download the v. Sphere 5 Power. CLI and install it on the server on which you will be working with your images. To test if your VMware Power. CLI is working, start the VMware v. Sphere Power. CLI command prompt and run Get Deploy. Command. This should give you a list of all the commands youll need to work with Auto Deploy. After this youre done and all requirements for v. Sphere Auto Deploy have been installed. Preparing your first image. When installing v. Sphere Auto Deploy, youre asked for a directory for your Software. Depot. This might be a bit confusing since it actually is never used by YOU, only by the Auto Deploy software for internal housekeeping. My advice is to also create a directory called VIB downloads in which you store the VIBs and images you want to deploy. Calculator Program In Vb more. First well deploy the basic VMware ESXi 5. Well attach the image to the host based on mac address and want the host to show up in your v. Center in a folder named Staging. Since it has no configuration, I dont want it to show up in a cluster yet. All the info we need IP address of the host and the DNS hostname. Folder name StagingMac address 0. Image name VMware ESXi 5. VMware siteImage name ESXi 5. Important Since well be using DHCP to assign a fixed IP and hostname to the host, you need to create a DHCP reservation for the mac address. In your DHCP scope create the reservation and use the proper hostname. In DNS create an A record for this hostname and IP address and make sure you give it a PTR reverse lookup record too. Adding a new image to your depot. This is what confused me during my first steps with v. Sphere Auto Deploy. I was doing all sorts of things trying to add the VMware ESXi 5. I copied the whole zip into it, but that didnt work, unzipping and copying didnt work either. Until I learned that you dont do anything with the software depot directory.