As I alluded to yesterday, I am changing roles here at VMware. I am thrilled to have been chosen to fill a brand new role of Social Media Specialist.

I’ll be the eyes & ears for VMware in the social networking world, assisting where I can in getting the information you need in your hands. It’s less of a technical role (I will not be working your tech support cases online!), but if I know of a self-help resource for you, I’ll send you the link.

If you’re a Twitterer, follow me: @vmwarecares

As I wrap up my stint on the Knowledge Base Team at VMware (I’ll tell you what I’m up to next in another post) I came across a handy index, or table of contents for the whole knowledgebase, available on one page!

Click here to see the KB Index.

Sure makes it easy to search!

This is not official or even verified, but I have heard recently that the vm-support script for ESX 4.0 hosts doesn’t behave quite the same as what we’ve become accustomed to in the past.

In some cases, the information that would normally be in the /tmp directory of the untarred vm-support output will instead be located in:

/usr/lib/vmware/hostd/docroot/downloads

From what I’ve heard, this does not happen in all instances, and /tmp will be populated with the files that we have learned to expect from the ESX 3 family.

There is one more odd-ball to this mystery, where it is suggested that running vm-support from the COS vs from vSphere Client will result in different behavior, again, I have not verified this. It may or may not be related to where the script run is triggered, or instead by other circumstances unrelated to how the script was called.

An issue has been reported in the field regarding delays and slow performance when using the View Client if HTTP 1.1 has not been enabled in Internet Explorer.

This may be seen when:

1. Connecting to the View Connection Server
2. Logging in and performing authentication
3. Connecting to the virtual desktop

The following KB has been created to address the issue:
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1011655

The View 3.1 Release Notes will also be updated to include this information.

A new bunch of patches for ESX 3.5 and 3.0.x were posted this week from VMware. If you’re still in the old Virtual Infrastructure 3 world, you might want to look in to the latest patches as they contain security and critical updates.

Patch Download and Installation

See the VMware Update Manager Administration Guide for instructions on using Update Manager to download and install patches to automatically update ESX Server 3.5 hosts.

To update ESX Server 3.5 hosts when not using Update Manager, download the most recent patch bundle from http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches_35.html and install the bundle using esxupdate from the command line of the host. For more information, see the ESX Server 3 Patch Management Guide.