NetApp announces ESX Host Utility 5.1 GA!

For those of you in the ESX space who are religious about your installation and deployment of Host Utility Kits (I hope you are!) 5.1 has just been announced! Hooray!

ESX Host Utilities 5.1 contain the following new features:

  • Support for ESX 4.0 hosts.
  • Support for role-based access control (RBAC) user names so that root access to storage controllers is not required.
  • The mbralign program that fixes misaligned VMDK partitions.
  • New timeout values added to config_hba to support software iSCSI initiators on 10 Gb Ethernet. Check the Interoperability Matrix for supported 10 Gb configurations.
  • Updated SNIA API libraries for Emulex and QLogic adapters.
  • An -expert option for the Host Utilities install command that installs the Host Utilities components but does not set timeouts or paths

And lots of other cool stuff, but these are the major high-lights, so get out there and download today! Hooray!

Sweet! NetApp VMware ESX Host Utility Kit 5.0R1 + mbrscan!

Sweet! Yea, you heard me, sweet!

The VMware ESX Host Utility Kit v5.0R1 was just released! Hooray!

And one of the coolest parts of it – mbrscan!

mbrscan – interrogates a disk file and reports on the primary partitions’ alignment

For those of you who haven’t used mbrscan, you can use it to check the alignment of your vm’s in order to determine if they’re properly aligned on disk.  I’ve done it on countless vm’s with great success.

The even greater success will come about when you use mrbalign which I hope to see get approved and added to the HUK sometime in the near future! (Though if you want/need access to mbralign, which actually –aligns- your vm’s for you – contact your local Sales/PS org :))

No, that wasn’t a pitch, that was merely a factual statement, it’s a sweet tool though! I used that to align my VM’s I run on VMware fusion :)