This morning I was watching some episodes of VMworld TV, one of the episodes announces the release of the iPAD vSphere Management App. This newly created app will be released at VMworld Europe (tweet from @vConsult). Funny detail in the video; the app is connecting to VMware ESXi 5.0 
For more VMworld TV check the YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/vmworldtv
A minut ago I was reading on Eric Sloofs blog (ntpro.nl) and I noticed the following line in the article SRM Futures: Host Based Replication;
Host based replication (HBR) is the ability to replicate VM’s between dissimilar storage. Meaning for example, from an ESX local hard drive to a storage array in a different location. This technology will be in a future version of SRM and it will allow you to protect a remote location as if you had replicating storage arrays in common between it and your main datacenter. SRM will allow you to replicate individual VM’s as part of a protection strategy. This replication will be done without guest agents and is managed inside SRM.
I’m looking forward to this feature since not every costumer has enough $$ or €€ to use storage replication.
Today I wanted to record the installation of VMware vSphere ESXi 4.1 using VMware workstation. It turns out that ESXi 4.1 cannot run in VMware Workstation 7.0, after the upgrade to 7.1 everything works just fine.
Installation video;
After the upgrade of vCenter yesterday, the goal for today was to upgrade 2 hosts to ESXi 4.1. The old hosts are running VMware ESX 4.0, since vSphere 4.1 is the last release containing VMware ESX I decided to make the move to ESXi to be prepared for future releases.
Because I was running ESX I had to perform new installations on the metal. The initial installation of ESXi 4.1 is pretty strait forward, just download the installable iso, burn it to a CD-ROM, put it into the server, boot from the CD, answer some questions and you’re ready to go.
I was surprised that all my old ESX 4.0 configuration scripts (PowerCLI) after some minor changes worked on the new ESXi host.
Bottom line, 2 hosts down, 6 to go.
Today I performed the upgrade from VMware vCenter 4.0 to vCenter 4.1. My old vCenter server runs Microsoft Windows Server 2003 32-bits, since vCenter 4.1 is not supported on a 32-bit operating system I made a new 2008R2 VM on which I will install the new version.
First make a back-up of the VMware vCenter database, the datamigration utility will upgrade the database. After the upgrade it isn’t possible to start the vCenter 4.0 service anymore!
For the migration I’ve used the datamigration utility which is available on the vCenter 4.1. media kit. Everything worked strait forward except the backup of the vCenter database (MS SQL Express 2005). I think the problem occurs because in the past this instance is upgraded from MSDE 2000 to SQL Express 2005. After I changed the named pipe string in the SQL connection manager from \\.\pipe\MSSQL$SQLEXPRESS\sql\query to \\.\pipe\sql\query (VMware KB 1024490) and restarted the SQL service it worked fine.
See VMware KB 1021635 for datamigration instructions. This instruction is also availible as VMware KB Video;
Finaly VMware released VMware vSphere 4.1 today. After testing and playing with the Beta for the last couple of months its now availible to the public.
Release notes (ESXi): http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esxi41_vc41_rel_notes.html
Whats new: http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_41_new_feat.html