ESXI VERSIONS INSTALL
ESXI VERSIONS UPDATE
ESXI VERSIONS UPGRADE
ESXI VERSIONS DOWNLOAD

As anyone who has ever architected anything can tell you, the simpler the better.ДЇor example, instead of installing a 3rd party agent for hardware monitoring, VMware introduced the Common Information Model or CIM. Simplification of Virtualization ManagementД«y integrating these management functions into the VMkernel, the ESXi architecture became much simpler than ESX. See a problem with that and running mission critical workloads? Absolutely.Д«y getting rid of this вЂњmanagement VMвЂќ, VMware was able to greatly reduce the attack surface of their hypervisor, which was becoming increasingly important as adoption grew so rapidly. This means the service console had to be patched just like any other Linux OS, and was susceptible to anything a Linux server was.

ESXI VERSIONS INSTALL

The reason it was so easy to develop and install agents on the service console was because the service console was basically a linux VM sitting on your ESX host with access to the VMkernel.

Remember those third party agents we talked about? Well in this case, a bad agent could bring you ESX host to a screeching halt, which was not a good thing. While the service console could only use up to 800 MB of RAM (which could be significant believe it or not in some of the hosts of the 2009 era), it still could wreak havoc with performance and stability. Performance and Stability for VMware ESXi

Here are a couple of reasons that VMware may have seen it fit to make this change. Everyone was virtualizing everything in site, and running their mission critical workloads on ESX. Remember, ESXi came out with vSphere 4 in 2009, which was the boom of virtualization.

When ESXi was created, VMwareВ integrated the service console functionality into the VMkernel, like this: Again, this is a very simple diagram but you can see what the major changes were, the biggest which is eliminating the service console completely from the ESXi architecture.ДЄs much as I resisted this change at the time, it made sense for a number of reasons. Wondering what is ESXi? It is the next generation of VMwareвЂ™s ESX hypervisor. The service console talked to the VMkernel, which is basically the brains of your ESX or ESXi host.Д«efore we talk more about the VMkernel, letвЂ™s take a look at what changed with ESXi. The ESX management agents also lived here in the service console.

ESXI VERSIONS DOWNLOAD

Here is a very simple depiction of what it looked like:Д«esides accessing the command line, you could download and instal almost any agent you wanted into the ESX service console, like agents for hardware monitoring, backup, or well, anything you wanted really. The service console allowed you to login to ESX and issue esxcfg commands at a command line to configure your host. Think of the service console as a small virtual machine that ran next to your guest VMs and provided management access to the ESX host. In fact, my first ever blog post was dedicated to the ESX service console. The main difference was the ESX service console. While the functionality of todayвЂ™s ESXi hosts is very similar (though much more advanced) to ESX, there are some important architectural difference. ESX was what VMwareвЂ™s bare metal hypervisor was originally called. It really is where virtualization got started.ДЇor todayвЂ™s VMware history lesson, we are going to start with ESX. ESX is what VMwareвЂ™s bare metal hypervisor we all know and love was originally called. Wondering what is ESX? ESX stands for Elastic Sky X.

Simplification of Virtualization Management.

Performance and Stability for VMware ESXi.

Hopefully, this will help make it easier to track VMware Tools versions throughout your environment. This web page was recently updated to reflect the latest VMware Tools to ESXi host version mappings. So how do you correlate the information provided by the interoperability matrix with the VMware Tools version as reported by the virtual machine? You can get that information from here. The virtual machines lists their tools version as a four-digit number which has no correlation with the corresponding ESX/ESXi host version: This is different from how the virtual machines report their VMware Tools versions. Notice that the interoperability matrix shows support based on the ESX/ESXi version that is providing the tools.

ESXI VERSIONS UPDATE

HereвЂ™s a quick example showing the VMware Tools support available with ESXi 5.1 Update 1: In that post I showed how you can use the VMware Product Interoperability MatrixВ to list the supported tools versions for a given ESXi release.

ESXI VERSIONS UPGRADE

A while back I posted a blog to answer the question вЂњ do I have to upgrade VMware Tools following an ESXi host upgrade?вЂќ.

Esxi versions