Update ESXi iSCSI Network Drivers - A Quick Guide

Posted on 15 Jan 2012

If you want to upgrade the network drivers within ESXi 5 follow these simple steps.

First off you need the name of the vmnic that you want to upgrade. Run this to display a list of installed network adapters currently in use.
# esxcfg-nics -l

Tagged with: vSphere

vSphere 5 - What's New (and relevant for the VCP 5) (Part 3)

Posted on 13 Nov 2011

This is part 3 of my guide, you can read part 1 here and part 2 here

Availability

High Availability (HA)

New features with HA include heartbeat Datastores and support for IPv6.  A heartbeat datastore is great because it helps to prevent situations where the management network drops out but the virtual machines continue running on the virtual machine network, and without the management network in place the HA cluster thinks that the ESX host is isolated and starts the HA recovery options.  Previously the only way to prevent this from happening is the configure a redundant management network on the storage network.

Tagged with: vSphere

vSphere 5 - What's New (and relevant for the VCP 5) (Part 2)

Posted on 13 Nov 2011

This is part 2 of my guide, you can read part 1 here

Storage

Quite a few improvements have been made to storage with vSphere 5.

Storage Profiles

Profile driven storage allows SLAs to be set to certain storage types,  For example this together with Storage DRS (explained below) can be used to automatically keep storage tiered so that high I/O VMs can remain on SSD drives.

Tagged with: vSphere