vSphere 4 -- Update 1: Thank you, VMware!

With any new release comes new constraints and challenges. This is not a dig on anyone, but simply the way many large scale software development projects go. VMware’s release of vSphere 4 brought along some much needed updates to handle a few of the larger constraints, while still adding improvements. Here are my personal favorites:

• Support for View 4, which also means View 4 has been released (separate blog post on this to come).
• Enhanced clustering support for Windows -- A BIG thank you for this one! No longer do you need to build separate resource pools for those MSCS VM’s. Just make sure you have all of the details, which are available here.
• Windows 7 and 2008 R2 support -- Included with this is the ability to run the VI Client from within a Windows 7 machine without the ridiculous batch workaround that was required previously. But, support for Server 2008 R2 has been critical as many people look to upgrade and stay just behind that Microsoft curve (known as the bleeding edge).

In addition, there is a large list of bugs/issues that have been corrected, some of which have caused us some pain during upgrades and deployments. Again, check out the details for all of these changes here.

Have you upgraded to Update 1? Let me know what your experience has been like. I’m off to the lab to upgrade one of our test hosts now …