When working with the beta of vSphere, I of course saw a lot of new big features. But I thought I’d show you some little changes that take away some of the annoyance I had when working with VI3 or just improved the usability with just little changes.
When you click on the summary tab of a VM there are a number of small changes. For example, the “Active Tasks” property in the General section. This helped me when I could not edit settings of the VM or even not power it down. Seemed there was still a snapshot creation running, although that had finished an hour ago but the job seemed stuck. Another nice improvement is the “Refresh Storage Usage” link. What I’m still missing, personally, is a list of the VMDKs on this point.
On the resource allocation tab you’ll find an overview of cpu and memory usage that reminded me of the good old ESX 2.5 days. All nice and colorful bars that I can’t tell apart from each other because I’m a bit colorblind. Nevertheless it gives me quite a lot of info, way more then we had in VI3.
Very useful improvement in the maps sections. Now you can double click an object (vm, host, network, datastore) and you are moved to it. Clicking a host, will bring you to the host’s map tab. Double clicking a datastore will bring you to the datastore summary tab. Very handy. Right clicking an object, instead of double clicking, will give you the menu options you would normally get when right clicking on it in the left hand pane.
Another nice addition is the Storage views tab. When choosing the Reports view, it gives a good overview of the VM’s storage, but don’t forget to click the little pull down menu beneath the “reports” and “maps” button. Lots of more nice views in that menu.
At host level clicking the performance tab, you can now also see the memory usage of the “Management agent” also refered to as COS. Very nice, especially when, like in VI3, sometimes a HP agent would start eating all your memory in the COS.