Due to the critical nature of many of these patches, VMWare recommends quick evaluation and application of these patches.

ESX350-200908401-BG, Updates forcedeth driver
The forcedeth driver installed on the ESX hosts causes the NVIDIA nForce Network Controller NICs to lose network connectivity until the forcedeth driver is reloaded. This patch addresses the issue.

The affected NICS are:

• NVIDIA nForce Professional 2200 MCP 1Gbe NIC
• NVIDIA nForce Professional 2050 I/O companion chip 1Gbe NIC
• NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 1Gbe NIC

ESX350-200908402-BG, Updates VMware Tools
After performing VMotion between ESX 3.0.x and ESX 3.5 hosts, virtual machines running on ESX 3.5 hosts are restarted in order to upgrade to the latest version of VMware Tools. After applying this fix, VMware Tools function as expected.

ESX350-200908403-BG, Updates megaraid and mptscsi drivers
This patch fixes the following issues:

• When the ESX host boots, the megaraid_sas driver heap gets depleted when claiming 4 LSI SAS RAID controllers on IBM System x3950 M2 Athena servers. This issue might cause the ESX host to stop booting. The fix increases the heap size for the megaraid_sas driver from 8 MB to 16 MB.
• The mptscsi_2xx driver limits the discovery of targets to 63 SAS devices per LSI Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) host bus adapter (HBA). This fix increases the number of targets to the value returned by the HBA firmware.

ESX350-200908404-BG, Updates vmkctl
When N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) enabled virtual machines are powered on on ESX hosts, a rescan issued from the VI Client results in an error message stating that the rescan failed, even if the rescan is successful.

ESX350-200908405-BG, Updates vmkernel
Running the esxtop command on the service console of the ESX hosts lists high values for the max limited (%MLMTD) parameter for virtual machines when no max limited parameter is set. When the high values are listed, the performance of the virtual machines might be affected. In the VI Client, the max limited parameter is set in the Resources tab for CPU in Virtual Machine properties.

ESX350-200908406-BG, Updates vmx
This patch provides the following:

• Adds support for new SCSI-3 status values in the SCSI emulation for virtual machines.
• Fixes an issue where powering on customized versions of Ubuntu virtual machines from the ESX hosts might cause the ESX hosts to stop responding.

ESX350-200908407-BG, Updates kernel source and vmnix
This patch updates the service console kernel for the following fixes:

The forcedeth driver installed on the ESX hosts causes the NVIDIA nForce Network Controller NICs to lose network connectivity under certain circumstances. The affected NICS are:

• NVIDIA nForce Professional 2200 MCP 1Gbe NIC
• NVIDIA nForce Professional 2050 I/O companion chip 1Gbe NIC
• NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 1Gbe NIC

A bnx2x firmware dump issue.

The mptscsi_2xx driver limits the discovery of targets to 63 SAS devices per LSI Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) host bus adapter (HBA). This fix increases the number of targets to the value returned by the HBA firmware.

ESX350-200908408-BG, Updates bnx2x driver
This patch fixes a bnx2x firmware dump issue.

Source: Boche

VMWare ESXi is also a free product, but lacks some of the features and management abilities of the VMWare’s flagship server virtualization hypervisor product, ESX.

“Nearly every SMB stands to benefit tremendously from virtualization. VMware Go will simplify virtualization for SMBs to a few easy online steps and was designed with SMBs in mind. We want SMBs who may be sitting on the fence to realize all the benefits of virtualization without burdening their limited IT resources,” said Dan Chu, vice president, emerging products and markets at VMware.

VMware Go was developed in partnership with Shavlik Technologies, and is available now as a beta offering on at http://www.vmware.com/go/vmware-go-beta. The final version should be available in 2010.

The video of Tim in the labs at AMD can be viewed below, as well as on his blog, where you can also find more info on AMD at VMworld.

Microsoft has announced the release to manufacturing, RTM, of its System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, and scheduled general availability via volume licensing for October 1. System Center Virtual Machine Manager is a unified, multi-vendor management solution for the virtualized datacenter that helps enable centralized administration of physical and virtual assets, increases server utilization, and provides dynamic resource optimization of virtual IT infrastructure.

The initial VMM 2008 release entered beta in the second quarter of 2008, roughly 8 months after the release of VMM 2007. The initial release of VMM 2008 introduced support for technologies like Hyper-V and VMware ESX. Now, a little over a year later, VMM 2008 R2 extends these capabilities to include:

• Live Migration — for moving virtual machines between hosts with no downtime
• Additional enhanced migration support for SAN migration in and out of clusters
• Multiple virtual machines per LUN using Clustered Share Volumes
• Hot add of virtual machine storage
• Functionality to migrate storage for running VMs
• iSCSI target and SAN-based migration across clusters
• Template-based rapid provisioning
• Maintenance mode to automate the evacuation of VMs off host machines,
• Live Migration host compatibility checks

A full list of changes can be found on the What’s New in VMM 2008 R2 page. If you would like to learn more on the new features and capabilities of VMM2008 R2, Microsoft TechNet Technical Product Manager, Kenon Owens, will be hosting a session entitled ‘Technical Overview of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2’ on Wednesday, September 9, at 10:00am Pacific.