Some people are experiencing issues mounting ISO files to VMs after performing a vSphere 4.0 to 4.1 upgrade. Symptom includes receiving the error message “The remote device on VMNAME connected to PathToISOFile is disconnected.” after attempting to mount an ISO file from within the vSphere client. This issue appears to be a client incompatibility issue related to co-existance of vSphere Client 4.0 and 4.1 on the same machine. To resolve the issue:
Building an Exchange 2010 environment on VMware is a fairly easy task, however if you want the installation to be fully supported by both VMware and Microsoft you are going to have to read a lot of documents to make sure your configuration (even though I’m sure it works) is not deemed unsupported. Of course if you never have to make a support call to Microsoft or VMware you probably don’t care, but in those situations when you need assistance because all hell has broken loose, you may appreciate the extra effort you went through in the beginning. I hope this will serve as a guideline for engineering your Exchange 2010 solution. Hopefully the readers of this article both fully understand the Exchange 2010 architecture and VMware vSphere architecture.
I was rereading the What’s New documents from VMware on their release of 4.1 ESX/ESXi and noticed that they make a recommendation to migrate your servers to ESXi in the 4.1 upgrade process if you can and avoid trying the ESX 4.0 to 4.1 upgrade process. Why would they recommend such a sweeping change? Well it seems like the speculations that have surrounded the ESXi platform since its release are coming true. ESX 4.1 will be the last ESX release. This is not to say that patches and possibly even updates to 4.1 will be released, but the next 4.2 or greater release will be ESXi only. This is a perfect time to take advantage of the small install footprint of ESXi and get those hard drives out of your ESXi servers altogether (unless you are using them for local VMFS storage space).
One of the biggest hurdles you may have to overcome in the upgrade of vCenter to the latest 4.1 platform is the fact that 32bit is no longer an OS option. With Microsoft abandoning 32bit OS support with the latest Server 2008 R2 offering it should be no surprise that vendors supplying software for Microsoft platforms will have to start releasing only 64bit software. In my lab my vCenter server is running a semi-unsupported configuration of Server 2008 R2 (now supported with vCenter 4.1) and SQL Server 2008 R2 Express (not supported).
Yesterday VMware released the next iteration of their cloud virtualization platform. If you are anything like me you are dying to get your old 4.0 ESXi systems updated pronto. This method of upgrade is going to focus on only this scenario: