Hi there,
Just some screenshots and comments about new ESX 3.5 & VC 2.5 features.
Logon with the VI Client
Starting the VI Client, I noticed a little change in the text and when you logon using the hostname instead of the FQDN, you’ll receive a certificate warning box
Getting Started Wizard
Next thing you’ll immediately notice is the “Getting Started Wizard”. On quite a number of levels, you can find these wizards like Hosts & Clusters view, Datacenter, Host, VM, Resource Pools and Clusters. The wizard helps you with the most common task to get you familiar with VC 2.5 as soon as possible. Did you notice the “Close tab” in the upper right corner? The wizards can be disabled for the advanced users.
Plugins
In the menu-bar I noticed a plugins option. Clicking it and installing the”VMware Update Manager Extension” and “VMware Converter Enterprise”, gave me two new options in the top bar. The “Consolidate” button and the “Update Manager” button. I’ll explore boh buttons later on.
Hosts & Clusters
To wade through all the options I started at the “Hosts & Clusters” level and the DataCenter level (alsmost identical). The datacenter tab didn’t bring anything new and the virtual machines tab looks the same as in VC2.0. I did notice I can now also view the column DNS Name, not sure if this was in VC2.0 already. On the hosts tab and the task & events tab, I couldn’t find any new info or columns. Except for quite a number of warning messages that my storage for VMware Update Manager is low. It is pointing to c:\documents and Settings\….. have to get an extra disk for this :-). It a shame that you can’t select the warning or error message in the “Event details” screen. Would be much easier for copying and pasting when looking for support. The alarms tab, permissions tab and maps tab look like there hasn’t changed anything. But the “Update Manager” tab is completely new. On a seperate page I’ll write more about the update manager.
Hosts level
At the hosts level, there is ofcourse the “Getting Started” tab again and at the “Summary Tab” there now is an option to make an Annotation. I often use them for my VMs, but not yet for the hosts. We’ll see :-)
The “Resource Allocation” tab showed different values then the one I was used to see. When looking at the cpu reseravtions and shares, I noticed that each VM (all single cpu) still had the value “Normal Shares” but the “Shares Value” now was set to 4000. I edited the cpu resources for a VM and noticed that the values related to the settings Low, Normal, High had changed. They now are: low = 2000, normal = 4000, high = 8000 shares. They doubled each value. Well no big deal I guess, because its all relative :-) When using esxtop at the cos, I noticed that there was a change in how the shares are displayed. In ESX 3.0.2 one could see the number of shares in the “ASHRS” column like 1000, 2000, 2217, etc. But now in ESX 3.5 it shows only a value of -3 in my case. See the screenshots below:
For the memory resources there is a change as well. Low memory shares is a value of 327680, normal is 655360 and high is 1 million shares.
Performance graphs
It is now easier to switch from cpu to memory or other standard graphs. In the upper right corner, there is a little pulldown menu for easy switching. It also includes a new graph “Management Agent” which shows the memory usage of the service console. Another new option is “System” which shows quite a number of cpu and memory countes for the host.
I discovered it gets even better. You can save your own views and have them listed in the dropdown menu !!! For example, for the realtime network counters, I would like to add “Network Packets Transmitted” and “Network Packets Received” and view this on a regular basis. You can now save your view by pressing “Save chart settings” and the name of this chart setting will be available in your dropdown list.
Next post will be about the “Configuration” tab.
test