Going over the vSphere 5.1.0a Release Notes

Posted on 4 mins read

Less than a month – that is all it took for VMware to release an update to vSphere 5.1.0.

A good thing? A bad thing – that I will leave for another post – in this one I will go over the release notes once more as I did last month in my post Read the vSphere 5.1 Release Notes!!

Here are my takeaways from the 5.1.0a Release Notes

Recommendation

Takeaways:

  • This has changed since the last release notes. It was not there before. This will introduce additional overhead to the upgrade process

Questions:

  • What changed since a month ago?
  • What is the reason for this recommendation to to do it step by step?

CLI

Takeaways:

  • This was also not there a month ago – same point as above above the overhead with people with non-English locales.

Questions:

  • What is the difference between performing from the command-line – than through the GUI. From what I see – there are no extra parameters being passed to the MSI package – so why the recommendation?

Solved1

Solved2

Solved3

Solved4

Solved5

Takeaways:

  • It is good to see that VMware have fixed some problems with the installation process before.

Questions:

  • Was the release rushed out – so that these issues were not addressed before hand?
  • Why are the majority of these directly related to SSO? (more on that as well in another post)

SSO6

Takeaways:

  • This is a new issue.

Questions:

  • I appreciate that VMware says that I have to enable short names on the volumes…. but wouldn’t it have been more productive in explaining how to do that?

SSO5

Takeaways:

  • This is a new issue.
  • Don’t use a Domain account for SSO installation. Again introduces overhead in the upgrade/installation.

Questions:

  • What is Single Sign On 1.0 – is this the version that was released with 5.1? Have we not had enough of multiple versions of products causing complete and utter confusion?

SSO4

Takeaways:

  • This is a new issue.
  • Don’t use wonky characters in your passwords.

Questions:

  • I wonder which poor sod has a 32 character password?

Web Client

Takeaways:

  • This is a new issue.
  • You might need to reboot your vCenter

Questions:

  • Would it not have been easier to force the reboot to solve these sort of issues?

SSO3

Takeaways:

  • This is a new issue.
  • Don’t try and be smart when re-installing – stay on the same path.

SSO2

Takeaways:

  • This is a new issue.
  • Additional manual step needed.

Questions:

  • Why could this not be automated?

Windows Authentication

Takeaways:

  • This is a new issue.
  • You will now have to use Local SQL authentication – this could be problem for a number of organizations

Questions:

  • Why was this removed?
  • If local SQL authentication is not allowed in your environment – what are you going to do?

RSA_USER

Takeaways:

  • This is a new issue.
  • Not clear to me. Which GPO policy? The one that is applied to the vCenter Server? And if this is the appliance?  What then?
  • Regarding the 32 characters and the wonky characters – see above…

Suspended

Takeaways:

  • This is a new issue.

Questions:

  • Are you kidding me? 
  • And if I have such a machine – how am I supposed to power it off? I would assume – resume then poweroff. If so why not explain this in the release notes. If I can’t power off a suspended machine – then what?

DomainUsers

Takeaways:

  • This is a new issue.
  • VMware mentioned that the upgrade should be done with the independent installer – as noted above – perhaps this is why?

Questions:

  • Where is the list of user provided – and why on earth should any of these users be deleted. AN upgrade is supposed to keep the previous state and updated the software.
  • How am I supposed to get these users back?

SSO

Takeaways:

  • This is a new issue.
  • Pretty straight forward and obvious. SSO is now a critical component of your VMware environment – you had better get used to this.

Certificates

Takeaways:

  • This is a new issue.
  • SSL certificates is a messy subject – it takes time, and is usually complicated to implement.

Questions:

  • Is this only for the vCenter Service SSL certificate? What about the other components?
  • And since when is only one kind of key (PKCS#1) supported ?

ASCII

Takeaways:

  • This is a new issue.

Questions:

  • English is the global language – but not the only one used. If you offer localized installations options then they should be supported the whole way down the chain.

Pointed to KB

Takeaways:

  • This is an old issue – the only that changed was the pointer to the official KB on subject.

One last thing that I noticed – but not in the release notes

Update Manager

Takeaways:

  • The upgrade of the ESXi hosts – cannot be done with Update manager.

Questions:

  • Why the heck not? Isn’t that what Update Manager is for?