Turns out a lot of systems have been dropped from the latest version of vSphere 5.5
Hopefully, this list will shrink as I am sure the recently released x222 node from the IBM PureFlex Systems will raise some eyebrows.
http://www.virten.net/2013/09/vsphere-esxi-5-5-unsupported-hardware/
Double check your vendors support when updating ESXi hosts from VMware vSphere 5.x to 5.5. There are a lot of systems that are no longer supported. The following servers were supported in 5.x but are no longer supported in 5.5:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-Platform-Whats-New.pdf
VMware vSphere® 5.5 introduces new functionality to leverage flash storage devices on a VMware ESXi™ host. The vSphere Flash Infrastructure layer is part of the ESXi storage stack for managing flash storage devices that are locally connected to the server. These devices can be of multiple types (primarily PCIe flash cards and SAS/SATA SSD drives) and the vSphere Flash Infrastructure layer is used to aggregate these flash devices into a unified flash resource. You can choose whether or not to add a flash device to this unified resource, so that if some devices need to be made available to the virtual machine directly, this can be done. The flash resource created by the vSphere Flash Infrastructure layer can be used for two purposes: (1) read caching of virtual machine I/O requests (vSphere Flash Read Cache) and (2) storing the host swap file.
You may have noticed that after Turning On vSphere HA in Cluster settings from the Sphere Client that a Configuration Issues warning yellow box may appear on the Summary page of ALL host ESXi servers in the vSphere Cluster.
VMware vSphere HA will still function correctly, the configuration issue, is warning that there is only one physical network interface connected to the virtual vswitch which has the service console (ESX) or management network interface (ESXi) connected.
These configuration issues and warnings alert triangles can be suppressed as follows
The vSphere Cluster settings dialogue box will be opened.
The Advanced Options (vSphere HA) dialogue box will open.
Click the left-hand column under Option, and enter das.ignoreRedundantNetWarn
Click the right-hand column under Value, and enter TRUE.
Click OK to return to Cluster Settings.
This action will disable HA on ALL ESX/ESXi hosts in the cluster. Please note I would recommend any changes to a production environment be carried out and schedule out of core SLA hours.
Click OK. The HA cluster will be reconfigured, this will take a few seconds.
The vSphere Cluster settings dialogue box will be opened.
Select Turn ON vSphere HA (by clicking and ensuring a Tick appears in the box)
Click OK.
The HA cluster will be reconfigured, this will take a few seconds (test with five hosts took 40 seconds).
The Configuration Issues yellow box in the Summary Page and Warning Triangle will disappear immediately.
VMware Hybrid Cloud, allows you to migrate your workload from your own vSphere infrastructure onto another vSphere cloud which is maintained and operated by an external party. Another example is; in some situations, you may need both a local server running specific applications and a cloud service that hosts additional applications, files, or databases. In such a situation, the two are often configured for interoperability.
vSphere 5.5 has been made available for all to download. I am looking forward to testing this new release and blogging about my experience. Check back soon for the write-up.
Check out the following link for all the ‘must know’ information,
http://blogs.vmware.com/kb/2013/09/vsphere-5-5-is-here-kbs-you-need-to-know-about.html
What is the impact of enabling EVC on your vSphere Cluster?
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMware-vSphere-EVC-Perf.pdf
Basically, the test results show that almost all workloads perform well even when the virtual machine presents an EVC mode that corresponds to an older processor generation. The EVC mode setting had varying impact on workload performance based on the ESXi hosts’ CPU instruction set features made available and their relevance to the workloads.
One workload, AES-Encryption, didn’t fare as well due to a dependence on special-purpose instruction sets only available in younger processor generations.
Encountered this problem recently while I was migrating a vSphere environment across to newer hardware. I needed to migrate a template across which required converting the template back to a VM, then using Veeam migrating across to the new vCenter, once there I converted back into a template. Also along for the ride were a couple of guest customization scripts which I exported from the source and imported on the new hardware. Easy right?
Unfortunately, whenever I tried to deploy a VM from this template it threw the following error “Customization of Windows guests fails with the error: Customization of the guest operating system ‘windows7Server64Guest’ is not supported in this configuration”. Now VMware does have a knowledge base article on this problem but it simply asked me to install VMware tools. Well, VMware tools were already installed. I found another suggestion here Pepper Crew Blog but that did not solve the problem either.
What ended up solving the problem for me was converting the template back to a VM, powering the VM on then updating the existing VMware Tools to a newer version. Once I had completed the VMware Tools update it had resolved the problem.
Link to VMware Knowledge Base Article: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1020716
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-Platform-Whats-New.pdf
VMware vSphere® 5.5 introduces many new features and enhancements to further extend the core capabilities of the vSphere platform. This paper will discuss features and capabilities of the vSphere platform, including vSphere ESXi Hypervisor™, VMware vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA), virtual machines, VMware vCenter Server™, storage networking and vSphere Big Data Extensions.
•vSphere ESXi Hypervisor Enhancements
–Hot-Pluggable SSD PCI Express (PCIe) Devices
–Support for Reliable Memory Technology
–Enhancements for CPU C-States
•Virtual Machine Enhancements
–Virtual Machine Compatibility with VMware ESXi™ 5.5
–Expanded vGPU Support
–Graphic Acceleration for Linux Guests
•VMware vCenter Server Enhancements
–VMware® vCenter™ Single Sign-On
–VMware vSphere Web Client
–VMware vCenter Server Appliance™
–vSphere App HA
–vSphere HA and VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler™ (vSphere DRS) Virtual Machine–Virtual Machine Affinity Rules Enhancements
–vSphere Big Data Extensions
•vSphere Storage Enhancements
–Support for 62TB VMDK
–MSCS Updates
–vSphere 5.1 Feature Updates
–16GB E2E support
–PDL AutoRemove
–vSphere Replication Interoperability
–vSphere Replication Multi-Point-in-Time Snapshot Retention
–vSphere Flash Read Cache
•vSphere Networking Enhancements
–Link Aggregation Control Protocol Enhancements
–Traffic Filtering
–Quality of Service Tagging
–SR-IOV Enhancements
–Enhanced Host-Level Packet Capture
–40GB NIC support