Virtualization Team

If you are as paranoid with redundancy as my team & I are, then entering the hostnames & IPs of all the server in a cluster into the VMware host file is a must. As your VMware HA is dependant on your servers being able to resolve the names of itself & other ESX server in the cluster, the DNS get to play a major role in HA. What if DNS fail? As many customers are using Microsoft DNS as their primary means of DNS, there is a chance it will fail a day or another. Would you like a way to ensure that your HA will work even if your DNS fail? then Adding these records to the host files of each of the ESXi server in the cluster will do the trick. What if you did not even have a DNS & still want to implement HA & other feature that depend on name resolution, then again adding the records to the host file is the solution.

Did the title bring your attention? Have you heard that one of the main reasons for VMware ESXi was to get rid of the service console? Are you sure there is no console in VMware ESXi? The true is there is still a very tiny console in VMware ESXi, though it has way smaller foot print than the one found in the ESX version. In addition, the usage of the VMware ESXi Console Access is not supported unless if instructed by VMware to do so. Please use this tip wisely & don’t try to do wild changes using your VMware ESXi console as that is not supported. Yeah, again I would repeat its not supported .

It had been asked so often lately, if VMware vSphere support SRM & VMware View yet. I had even got calls from customers who tried to integrate the two together. The VMware statement is quite clear in this regard, both VMware Site Recovery Manager(SRM) & VMware View are not supported yet by VMWare vSphere 4.0. They will be supported by sometime in the 2nd half of this year. To check the support matrix & when its going to happen for most VMware product with vSphere, please check out the below document:

VMware vSphere 4.0 Software Compatibility Matrix