The upgrade the VMWare ESX 4.0 Update 1 ran smoothly and all hosts came back to life after the upgrade as they should. Installation of the client on Windows 7 was also painless, and best of all it actually worked.

To anyone from VMWare who may be watching, it would be nice if you had some form of announcements mailing list so we could be informed of these updates being made available.

There are certain things that when it doesn’t work you wouldn’t be surprised. We all have that application that hasn’t been updated in years but we still need to use on a regular basis. I can somewhat understand why these things don’t work within a new operating system. But for something that gets updated on a regular basis to not work, that is a different story altogether and that really annoys me.

Given that some form of Windows 7 has been available to vendors for a long time it shows VMWare with a high level of contempt for it’s users. There is absolutely no excuse for there not to be an update to support Windows 7, especially considering there have been reports of it not working from early RC days.

The official response from VMWare (KB 1011329) is to just use a XP virtual machine. There is not even a mention on how long they will take to fix the issue.

Kiwi Si at Techhead has found a better workaround but still while this gets things working there should be a better option. We all pay a lot of money for VMWare and as such should deserve better treatment.

I have just tested and it now supports Boot from SAN. WOOT!! I have been looking into using USB drives as a way to boot my VMWare farm servers, but am a little nervous about the lack redundancy. So now I can carve out 2gb of redundant storage from my SAN for each server and save on having local disks that are very much under utilised.

It also looks like you can install the Free version direct to USB Drive rather than having to hack together something from the ISO and using DD or winimage to flash the USB.

This is an excellent move from VMWare and I look forward to reporting back on any other new features i find.

And as an a-side the Cacti Graphs found on this site still work under the new version. Now to find out if there is SNMP support in this release or not (I dont suppose I will be given everything I want in one go!)

VMWare ESXi 3.5 CPU Graph in Cacti

VMWare ESXi 3.5 Memory Graph in Cacti

This method uses the VMWare Remove CLI tools to connect to the ESX server and download the information via an XML interface.

Software Required:

• Download the VMWare Remote CLI from http://www.vmware.com/go/remotecli
• Cacti http://www.cacti.net/

Firstly download and install the VMWare Remote CLI tools to your Cacti server.

Next you need to add a user to ESX for the statistics collection.

On the ESX Virtual Infrastructure Client goto the “Users & Groups” tab.

VMWare ESXi 3.5 Add Stats User Step 1

Right Mouse Click and “Add” a new user.

VMWare ESXi 3.5 Add Stats User Step 2

Then go to the “Permissions” tab, and Right Mouse Click to “Add Permission”.

VMWare ESXi 3.5 Add Stats User Step 3

Add the new StatsUser and select Read-Only for the assigned role and click Ok.

Now goto your Cacti installation and copy the “esxstats.pl” file into your cacti scripts directory and import the “cacti_host_template_vmware_esxi_3_5_host.xml” file into Cacti using the web interface. These scripts can be downloaded from the bottom of this post.

You should now be able to add a new ESX host into cacti. You will need to specify the “Downed Device Detection” mode to just “Ping” as there is no SNMP on the current Free version of VMWare ESXi 3.5.

I am hoping that SNMP support will come to the free versions as that would make life much easier.

Files Required:

• VMWare ESXi 3.5 Cacti Graph Files