vSphere 4 update 2 is next?

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vSphere 4 update 2 is next?: "









Not 4.1 first, but Update 2.


A simple forum discussion on the VMware Forums has revealed that the next update for VMware vSphere 4 will be Update 2. One could imagine that the 4.1 version will come out first. At least me I thought that the 4.1 will be here in no more than a month from now on….


And there had been some informations in the past concerning future release of vSphere 4.1, but with vSphere 4.0 Update 2 we might see an intermediary release before the 4.1 version expected later this year.


Below you’ll find the extraction from the forum discussion about one of the new features coming in the Update 2 release….


This is classic split brain – an increased risk when running in a stretch cluster. Each side will think the other is dead and will try to failover the vms. Failover will fail if both sides can see storage and disk locks are held. If side A also loses access to some storage, then vms running from that storage will lose their disk locks and the vms will be failed over to side B. The vmx processes will actually remain running on side A but only the ones on side B will have access to the vmdk files so data corruption is prevented. When the network is restored, vCenter will see the vm running on 2 hosts and in the client you’ll see the vm switching back and forth between the 2 hosts since vCenter doesn’t really know how to handle this. The copy of the vm running on side A (which has lost the lock) will issue a question indicating that the lock was lost. If you connect directly to the host and answer the question, the vm will automatically power down, leaving the vm running on side B and things will clear up in vCenter. In 4.0 update 2, the question will be auto-answered and things should clear up without user action.


A split brain situation will be automatically handled by vSphere 4 update 2.


Split brain vSphere uses the same lockfile that is used in HA and which makes sure that an isolated host does not accidentally start a VM that is running elsewhere.


Quoted from Mike Laverick’s blog:


Split brain is HA situation where an ESX host becomes “orphaned” from the rest of the cluster because its primary service console network has failed. As you might know the COS network is used in the process of checking if an ESX host has suffered an untimely demise. If you fail to protect the COS network by giving vSwitch0 two NICs or by adding a 2nd COS network to say your VMotion switch, under-desired consequences can occour. Anyway, the time for detecting split brain used to be 15 seconds, for some reason this has changed to 12 seconds. I’m not 100% why, or if in fact the underlying value has changed – or that VMware has merely corrected its own documentation. You see its possible to get split brain in Vi3.5 happening if the network goes down for more than 12 seconds, but comes back up on the 13th, 14th or 15th second. I guess I will have to do some research on this one. Of course, the duration can be changed – and split brain is trivial matter if you take the neccessary network redundency steps…


Sources: Duncan and Mike



You might also be interested in those related posts from my website:

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