Vmware released a new vCenter Converter Standalone version which is now fully compatible with vSphere 4.1.
What’s New
The VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 4.3 includes the following new functionality:
- Support for VMware vSphere 4.1 as source and destination targets
- Support for importing powered-off Microsoft Hyper-V R1 and Hyper-V R2 virtual machines
- Public API and sample code for submitting and monitoring Converter jobs
- Support for importing Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 sources
- Ability to throttle the data transfer from source to destination based on network bandwidth or CPU
- IPv6 support
Discontinued Support
- Support of the following operating systems is discontinued:
- Support for OVF format is discontinued
- Support for VCB image sources is discontinued
- Linux installation support is discontinued
Check out the release notes after the jump and download it here
Today VMware released the newest version of vSphere, version 4.1 
Whats new:
Scripted Install for ESXi. Scripted installation of ESXi to local and remote disks allows rapid deployment of ESXi to many machines. You can start the scripted installation with a CD-ROM drive or over the network by using PXE booting.
vSphere Client Removal from ESX/ESXi Builds. For ESX and ESXi, the vSphere Client is available for download from the VMware Web site. It is no longer packaged with builds of ESX and ESXi.
Boot from SAN. vSphere 4.1 enables ESXi boot from SAN (BFN). iSCSI, FCoE, and Fibre Channel boot are supported.
Hardware Acceleration with vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). ESX can offload specific storage operations to compliant storage hardware. With storage hardware assistance, ESX performs these operations faster and consumes less CPU, memory, and storage fabric bandwidth.
Storage Performance Statistics. vSphere 4.1 offers enhanced visibility into storage throughput and latency of hosts and virtual machines, and aids in troubleshooting storage performance issues. NFS statistics are now available in vCenter Server performance charts, as well as esxtop. New VMDK and datastore statistics are included. All statistics are available through the vSphere SDK.
Storage I/O Control. This feature provides quality-of-service capabilities for storage I/O in the form of I/O shares and limits that are enforced across all virtual machines accessing a datastore, regardless of which host they are running on. Using Storage I/O Control, vSphere administrators can ensure that the most important virtual machines get adequate I/O resources even in times of congestion.
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Today I got some problems with backing up one of my VM’s using VMware Data Recovery. I was looking what was going wrong after a few failures.. And yes.. hanging snapshots
Trying to remove the snapshots was a little bit different. When I went into the “Snapshot Manager” there were no active snapshots and I couldn’t delete the files. But while browsing the Datastore I saw many active snapshots.
Current situation:
- You can “Revert to Current Snapshot” via menu..
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Last weekend I downloaded the OpenFiler v.2.3 iso to configure the Central Storage solution in my homelab. After installing the software in a new VM I figured out how to configure iSCSI targets and present them to my ESX servers…
I’m running both VMware ESX 4.0 and ESXi 4.0 in my lab and both provide iSCSI functionality by default to connect through to an iSCSI target.
After I installed OpenFiler in a VM I connected to https://ip:446, you can manage your service account with the created root account and you can manage the OpenFiler with the following credentials Username: Openfiler Password: password
My configuration staps…
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Configure OpenFiler:
Create a new volume group:
1. Physical Volume – Assigning space on a physical disk for use in a Volume Group.
2. Volume Group – Contains Physical Volumes from which a Logical Volume will be created.
3. Logical Volume (LUN) – This is what is presented through to a server
- Select volume and give a volume group name (in my case VMpros)
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Today I was playing with automatic installation of VMware Tools by using Active Directory Group Policy and Security Groups on my Windows 2008 test environment.
What did I do to realize the automated installation:
- Create a Security Group in AD called: “SW_VMware Tools 64-Bit”
- Create in Group Policy Management a new GPO called “SW_VMware Tools 64-Bit”
- Computer Configuration > Software Settings > Software Installation> New > package
- Select from shared location (in my case: \\VMPROS-DC01\Software Deployment\ ) “VMware Tools64.msi”
- In the security tab: VMware Tools 64-Bit need read rights
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Some “blogging” colleagues posted their home lab configuration on the internet, see the list below:
I also give it a try and post my test lab on my blog.
I own 3 physical machines that I moved a few months ago to the datacenter at my work in Soest (the Netherlands). With a VPN tunnel from my Cisco ASA 5505 (at home) to the datacenter, my 50/50 mbit ISP, it feels like the systems are near me
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