Although only a minor version I do feel that it is worth mentioning and notifying people about. vSphere 5.0 Update 1 (click here for vCenter release notes and here for ESXi release notes) contains some cool enhancements. I listed the fixes or new features which I personally ran in to the last couple of months or which are worth implementing or important to list in specific scenarios. Especially the HA (FDM) fixes are welcome, but also the “disk.terminateVMonPDLDefault” enhancement was. I will write some more about that later today though.

vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1:

• Resolved: HA and DRS appear disabled when VM Storage profiles feature is enabled or disabled for a cluster.
  When VM storage profiles feature is enabled or disabled for a cluster, it causes a discrepancy in HA and DRS cluster configuration.
• Resolved: File-based FDM logging can be enabled inadvertently for ESX 5.x hosts in a mixed cluster with ESX 5.x and ESX 4.x hosts.
  The default FDM logging behavior for ESX 5.x hosts is to use syslog, file-based logging is disabled. In a HA cluster with mixed of 5.x and pre-5.x hosts using DAS advanced option das.config.log.maxFileNum to increase number of log files on the pre-5.0 hosts will inadvertently enable file-based logging for ESX 5.x hosts. This can lead to ESX scratch partition to run out of space.
  This issue is resolved in this release by introducing HA cluster advanced parameter “das.config.log.outputToFiles”. To enable file-based logging for ESX 5.x hosts, both “das.config.log.maxFileNum” need to configure to a value greater than 2 and “das.config.log.outputToFiles” is equal to “true”.

ESXi 5.0 Update 1:

• Resolved / New: No error message is logged when VMkernel stops a virtual machine on a datastore that is in PDL state
  When a SCSI device goes into permanent device loss (PDL) state, all the virtual machines that use datastores backed by that SCSI device are affected. Some third party HA solutions incorporate a VMX option where disk.terminateVMOnPDLDefault is set to True. With this option the VMkernel stops such affected virtual machines. Starting with this release, when VMkernel stops affected virtual machines, a warning message similar to the following is logged in vmkernel.log once for each virtual machine.
• New: Enablement of session timeout to ESXi Tech Support Mode (TSM)
  After you log in to an ESXi host at the console and then log in to the Tech Support Mode (Mode) as root user and initiate a remote server console access session, a non-privileged user might obtain root access to the ESXi host, if the remote access session has not timed out or remains idle.Starting with this release, you can configure a session timeout to exit ESXi Tech Support Mode (TSM) as follows:
  1. Log in to Tech Support Mode (Mode) as root user.
  2. Edit /etc/profile file to add TMOUT=<timeout value in seconds>.
  3. Exit Tech Support Mode (Mode).

vShield 5.0.1:

• New: vShield App High Availability enhancements automatically restarts vShield App or virtual machines if a heartbeat is not detected.
• New: Enablement of Autodeploy (Stateless ESXi) by providing vShield VIBs (host modules) for download from vShield Manager.