Equallogic releases Firmware 4.0.1

Wow, now thats a first. Today I visited the equallogic support portal and wondered why there again was a new firmware available. A few days ago 3.3.3 was posted and NOW..wow...there you go with 4.0.1. The features are amazing, you can now assign a special port just for managing and the most important thing in my opinion is the smart new restart function when updating to a newer version, it will smartly flip between the two controllers so you won´t have any downtime at all. Pretty smart. Also there were some improvements in Replication and other minor changes, also the new 5500 48Gig array is now supported. Also supported is now iSCSI IPv6 support. Now be aware of that: The update could easily take about 40 minutes, don´t get nervous, it´ll continue smart and clean till the end and you just have to restart which requires about 1,5 mins.Fair enough if you configured your qlogic devices in your ESX machines like I told you in one of my previous posts. I updated all my 4 eql arrays this night without problems.

 

VSS support in ESX3.5U2 - cute stuff rarely spoken of

One of the most exciting features in esx35u2 is the vss ability. but nobody makes a big deal about that. How come? Maybe this feature wasn´t documented very well at the very beginning so here is my two cents about that: 

Ever had anger with the famous sync driver inside the guests? Well, this little peace of software is used by vmware tools inside the guest to "harmonize" the file system before a snapshot is taken. Sadly this driver resulted very often in corrupt ad and exchange databases, so the general recommendation in the community was to turn this driver off (in hardware/unhide hidden devices/computer/sync driver/right klick/disable). Now the sad fact about that workaround was inconsistent snapshots sometime and i personally saw some other weird behaviour regarding this workaround.

But now there is the new VSS driver which is capable of using Microsofts Volume Shadow Copys inside the guest, therefor it´s a very clean and cute solution and no database corruption shall appear at all. But there are some things to highly consider: 

a) When you install a fresh new VM on a esx35u2 and install the vmtools, everything is great, vss driver is automatically installed

b) Sadly: When you just update an existing VM with the latest tools the sync driver is NOT installed automatically! So you HAVE TO trigger the installer, say Change and explicitly select the VSS driver in the manual installation mode!

c) VSS is used when triggering a backup with VCB (tested) and the latest version of vranger when "disable quiescing" is turned off  (tested) BUT VSS is NOT triggered when you perform a manual snapshot in VC. Weird. But important to know!

d) When VSS is triggered successfully Windows takes care of everything. Exchange/AD/SQL VSS providers inside the VM are triggered and harmonizing the databases. I guess this is the main reason why Microsoft just certified VMware for their virtualization program.

e) VSS is also triggered when using a manual crafted VCB script, like let´s say 'cscript pre-command.wsf (path) (vmname) fullvm'. Very important for people like me who like to deeply control the VCB interactions manually.