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vSphere 4.1 ESXi Installable on USB?

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

Looking at the ESXi Installable Setup guides for 4.1 and 4.0 reveals a change. In 4.0 under System Requirements, a USB drive was listed as a possible boot device, as well as being usable for installation. So you could stick in your installation media and select USB as the destination.

Under 4.1, USB is no longer listed in the documentation as a bootable device, though boot from SAN devices via HBAs is now supported.

I’ve not checked whether you can actually install ESXi Installable 4.1 to a USB drive. It may well be possible, but I suspect it’s dropped off the “Supported” list of options.

The only reason I can see to drop support for putting Installable onto USB is to encourage people to purchase and use ESXi Embedded from their hardware supplier instead.

Posted in VMware | No Responses »

After vSphere 4.1 – what will be going

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

vSphere 4.1 has been out for a couple of days now.

As well as the new features which have been covered extensively (see What’s New), the release notes list some future changes for the product range. They’re not really hidden but haven’t been given much publicity.

  • ESX will be dropped in future releases, with ESXi being the hypervisor product for vSphere.
  • Future versions of vCenter Update Manager will not scan or remediate guest OSes. I presume the cross-licensing costs of using Shavlik were outweighing any benefit. UM will continue to scan and update ESXi hosts. and presumably aid in conversion of ESX hosts to ESXi.
  • VMware vCenter Converter plugin and VMware vCenter Guided Consolidation are also going away in future versions. Converter will continue in a standalone format rather than a vCenter plugin.
  • Web Access isn’t available on ESXi so that’ll be going away when ESX is dropped too

There are a few other items being dropped such as support for some versions of Linux in guests, VMI paravirtualization support, and MSCS in Windows 2000 but they aren’t as widely used.

Posted in VMware | No Responses »