Reading Time: 9 minutes This is an article realized for StarWind blog and focused on the pro and cons of an upgrade to vSphere 6.5. See also the original post. VMware vSphere 6.5 is the latest version of the enterprise server virtual platform from VMware, but the new beta it’s already there for testers. Actually the next version it’s (in the beta) and you can register at https://secure.vmware.com/43478_vSphere_Beta_Reg.
Reading Time: 3 minutes Now that the PSOD on vSphere 6.5 and 10 Gbps NICs issue is finally solved seems that vSphere 6.5 critical bugs are closed, but it’s not totally true. During an upgrade from a vSphere 6.0, I’ve found a really strange iSCSI storage issues where all the VMs on the iSCSI datastore were so slow to become un-usable. First I was thinking about drivers or firmware, in the hosts and in the NIC (1 Gbps) or the firmware on the storage.
Reading Time: 2 minutes On October 2017, I wrote a post about a possible issue with vSphere 6.5 and 10 Gbps NICs (mostly standard on new deployment). The final result was a PSOD (Purple Screen Of the Death) and no solution was available (yet). VMware KB 2151749 describe this issue as related to possible upgrade at vSphere 6.5. But other customers have report the issue also on new deployment. Veeam, one of the first vendor to found this issues (from their customers), reports that the issues is due to network-intensive activities such as backup over NBD or vMotion randomly triggering one. […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes Seems that there are still some issues with vSphere 6.5, with a possible PSOD (Purple Screen Of the Death) after upgrade to 6.5U1 on ESXi hosts using 10 Gbps NICs. The VMware KB 2151749 describe this issue and explains that this occurs because Netqueue commit phase abruptly stop due to the failure of hardware activation of a Rx queue. As a result, Internal data-structure of the Netqueue layer’s could go out of sync with the device and cause PSOD.
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) is a vendor-neutral link layer protocol used by network devices for advertising their identity, capabilities, and neighbors on an IEEE 802 local area network, usually with Ethernet standard. Compared to Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) it’s not proprietary and can be used from different vendors. VMware vSphere adds LLDP capability in the Distribuited Virtual Switches (DVS). CDP it’s also available both in DVS, but also in standard virtual switches (by default it’s enabled in listen mode).
Reading Time: 3 minutes In a VMware infrastructure, when you build a new VM, the default compatibility level could depend on your vSphere version, from which client you are using (the legacy vSphere Client does not ask for VM virtual hardware version in the default wizard), but also from your cluster settings. VM virtual hardware version defines exactly the compatibility level, but you can define the default level using the vSphere Web Client or the new HTML5 Client.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Several people are disabling IPv6 support in ESXi for different reasons: because of the minimum privilege principle (if you are not using a service, why you have to keep it enabled?) or simple because they don’t want any IPv6 address in the network. On Linux and Windows systems is become very difficult disable it and Microsoft itself does not recommend disabling IPV6: ” We do not recommend that you disable IPv6 or its components, or some Windows components may not function.” (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/929852)
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