Itzikr's Blog

Hi,

As part of a minor upgrade, VMware just released vSphere 5.1 Update 1 and vCenter 5.1 Update 1

Some of the fixes could be related to things we have seen in the past so I’m hoping this release will fix them..

“Virtual machine power on operation might fail with VMFS heap out of memory warning messages
If a virtual machine has more than 18 virtual disks, each greater than 256GB, ESXi host might be unable to power on the virtual machine. A warning message similar to the following might be logged in vmkernel.log:

WARNING: Heap: 2525: Heap vmfs3 already at its maximum size. Cannot expand. WARNING: Heap: 2900: Heap_Align(vmfs3, 2099200/2099200 bytes, 8 align) failed. caller: 0x4180368c0b90 “

this one is interesting, the HEAP size was fix in a recent vSphere 5.0 patch but was never fixed in the vSphere 5.1 , this use case is relevant for XtremIO because customers are allowed to create much larger LUNS than what physically exist on the array due to the inline deduplication it offers

here’s how the heap size looks on an host running 5.1 prior to the U1 Update

and here’s how it looks like after the upgrade to Update 1, note that you can now change it to a much higher value (640), which allows for 60 TB of open virtual disk capacity on a single ESXi/ESX host.

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“Cloning a virtual machine from a template fails when the destination datastore is a Storage DRS POD
In vCenter Server, cloning a virtual machine from a template might fail when the destination datastore is a Storage DRS POD and the storage device has the de-duplication feature turned on. The following error is displayed:

Insufficient disk space on datastore xxxxx, this error message
applies to all datastores in the POD.

This issue is resolved in this release. “

we also have seen this with VMware VIEW

as above, we have seen it since when using Storage DRS and vCD, you will deploy them to the storage POD and you may see this error since we support inline data deduplication

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vSphere 5 Storage vMotion is unable to rename virtual machine files on completing migration

In vCenter Server , when you rename a virtual machine in the vSphere Client, the vmdk disks are not renamed following a successful Storage vMotion task. When you perform a Storage vMotion of the virtual machine to have its folder and associated files renamed to match the new name. The virtual machine folder name changes, but the virtual machine file names do not change.

This issue is resolved in this release. To enable this renaming feature you need to configure the advanced settings in vCenter Server and set the value to theprovisioning.relocate.enableRename parameter to true

not completely related to us but since customers just love cloning and moving vm’s around due to the amazing speediness of the system, it’s nice to have this fixed!