The process is pretty simple and detailed instructions can be found in the VMware KB here which includes this video:

I am not going to walk through the steps, the video does a great job of that. The video shows updating from 3.5 to 4.1, the only difference in the 4.0 to 4.1 upgrade process is the upgrade bundle that is used.

I had originally planned to do half my hosts on one morning and the second half the next but the upgrade was quick, it did not take more than 10 minutes for each host, so I went ahead and updated all of them.

My Week in Geek for the week ending Friday, January 28, 2011

1. I have been doing a lot of reading on setting up and using Private VLANs (PVLANs) primarily to isolate our testing/lab environment. Found a bunch of great articles including a Concept Overview of PVLAN on vNetwork Distributed Switch in the VMware KB, a VMware KB article on configuring PVLANs on a vNetwork Distributed Switch, a vimeo video by Eric Sloof on Configuring Private VLAN ids, and a configuration reference for PVLANs and a Cisco Nexus 5000 (even though this one is tailored to the Nexus 5000 it can be applied to any Cisco switch with and IOS that supports PVLANs). Lot of good info!
    
2. I am into amateur astronomy and astrophotography and here is a great little online eyepiece comparator tool. Just choose your scope and eyepiece and it does all the FOV, magnification, eye relief, and other calculations for you.
    
3. VMware just recently released two new advanced certifications, the VCAP-DCD and VCAP-DCA. Here is a nice list of study and preparation resources for folks interested in taking the one of these new exams.
    
4. The console to a Windows 2008 Server R2 (64 bit) is very sluggish. I have had this problem in my production environment and in the school lab environment. Console access to 2003 servers (32 bit) and XP (also 32 bit) desktops using the vSphere client is fine but on VMs running Server 2008 R2 (64 bit) the mouse is jumpy and it is almost unusable (connecting directly to the VM via RDP works fine). I found this VMware Community post and then this more up-to-date post on the issue. I updated the VMs’ mouse drivers, increased the video RAM, and updated to the WDDM video adapter driver – all of this did improve things considerably but the console is still a bit jumpy and sluggish compared to other (32 bit) VMs. Good to know I am not the only one that has had this issue – see here and here.
    
5. Over the last couple of weeks there has been some buzz on twitter, in the VMware Community forums, and in blogs about migrating from ESX to ESXi. With the release of vSphere 4.1 last summer VMware announced that 4.1 would be the last release of ESX, future releases would include only ESXi. We recently migrated our environment from ESX to ESXi without issue, and we have not had any issues with managing the environment. Here is another article on convincing your boss that the move to ESXi is a good idea. The letter provides some great talking points on the advantages of migrating to ESXi. What’s the difference between the two? Here is a VMware KB article that compares ESX and ESXi 4.1.
    
6. Here is an article on creating snapshots from ESXi Tech Support mode. With VMA, PowerCLI, and/or the vSphere client I am not sure why you would need to do this from TSM mode but I guess it is good to know it can be done.
    
7. Is NFS A Viable Protocol For Converged Networking? I currently use NFS to store VM templates, ISOs, and such but not production VMs. I have used it for test VMs in the past and it does seem to work fine but I did not do any real benchmarking. I also read a great article this week on the performance advantages (and disadvantages) of enabling Jumbo Frames for storage and vMotion but I forgot to bookmark it and have not been able to find it again here it is – Jumbo Frames Comparison Testing with IP Storage and vMotion.
    
8. VMware has released a draft of the vSphere 4.1 Security Hardening Guide last week. The draft will be available till approximately the end of February 2011 and VMware is looking for comments. The official document will be available after the draft period. Here is a post by virtuallyGhetto that list the changes between the 4.0 and the 4.1 guide and VMware has a comparison here.
    
9. iPhone Replacing Your Wallet! Very cool and like the author of the post I am also ALL IN! After a couple of glitches and some employees that were not quite sure of what was going on I was finally able to use the new Starbucks Mobile Card app. I think it would be awesome if my phone replaced my Visa and/or my check card.
    
10. Looking for some storage options for your lab? Check out these post on Installing and Running the Celerra Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) in your vSphere Lab Part 1 and Part 2 are available with parts 3 through 7 of the series promised to follow soon. I currently use Openfiler to provide iSCSI and NFS storage for my home lab but I am going to give the Celerra VSA a look.
     
11. YouTube Video of Bubba Blackwell’s World Record Jump of 40 EMC Symmetrix VMAX – “Big Iron Jumping Big Iron” – Love it! This was part of the EMC Record Breaking Event a couple weeks ago. Cheesy – yes – but it is so worth watching again (and again).
     

Have a great weekend!

1. I started off the week receiving my VCP welcome package from VMware including my certificate. Very cool! Sorry to brag but I am pretty proud of this.
    
2. A Compendium of Concerns About ESXi – about two weeks ago we migrated our environment from ESX 4.0 to ESXi 4.0. This is a great post that addresses most of the concerns/differences between the two hypervisor versions.
    
3. Last Thursday night The Blinky Light (TBL) had their first AskHarley twitter Q&A. Harley Stagner is a VCDX that works for TBL and they had folks tweet (or email) questions for Harley to answer. I participated with a few questions about storage multipathing for a project I am working on. A transcript of the chat session can be found here. I thought this was a great idea and hopefully TBL will have more of these Q&A sessions in the future.
    
4. Do you really need vMA? This is an interesting post asking about the need for the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) since most things can be done using PowerCLI. Though I do not use it that often I do use the vMA for troubleshooting and management. I have not really looked that deep into PowerCLI. Here is a great reply to the post from Duncan Epping @ Yellow-Bricks.com.
    
5. Check out Eric Sloof’s Online VMware Training Podcast which is now available on iTunes.
    
6. Enabling Tech Support Mode on ESXi Nice step by step how-to on the different ways to enable Tech Support Mode (TSM) on ESXi.
    
7. Depending on where you work the following video may not be safe if you have your sound turned up, but I don’t give a flying F*ck!
    
8. Starbucks launched their Card Mobile App this week for iPhone and Blackberry. I have all my gift cards from Christmas loaded up in it. Handy since I am always forgetting to put the cards in my wallet, but I always have my phone. The only issue is you cannot use it at the drive thru (at least not at the Starbucks I stop at on the way to school), something about them not being able to touch the phone for liability reasons. HEY STARBUCKS – FIX THIS!!!
    
9. vCenter and Memory Metrics is a great post that explains the different memory details that are reported in the vSphere Client.
    
10. Since I am trying to gain some familiarity with the PowerCLI, I found this post about Post configuration of ESX with PowerCLI pretty interesting.
     
11. CNN Money’s list of Top 100 Best Companies to Work For was released this week. Several tech companies on the list including Google, Microsoft, and NetApp. You can compare it to last year’s list here. If you work for any of these guys that is great, I don’t but I think where I work is a pretty great place (most days anyway).
     
12. Using PowerShell? Make your PowerShell For Loops 4x Faster!
     

Hope you had a great week!

We upgraded our test ESXi server this AM to ESXi 4.0 using the vSphere Host Update Utility. The upgrade went very well. The only real problem we ran into was with an older NIC that was not supported. No problems other than that.

Our test ESX server is a HP DL380 G4 with 2 3.6GHz Xeon CPUs (Single Core) and 4 GB RAM. This is managed as a stand alone server, it is not managed by vCenter.

If all goes well we will probably upgrade production ESX host this Sunday night.

Hope to have at least an overview of what I did at EMC World posted in the next day or so, just too busy right now.