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VMware has released ESXi 5.0 Driver Rollup version 2 which is a ESXi 5.0 installer with additional device drivers for products which are not supported in official ESXi 5.0 install image. vSphere ESXi 5.0 Driver Rollup install image is supported only for fresh installs, migrations from ESX 4.x or upgrades from ESXi 4.x are not supported with ESXi 5.0 Driver Rollup installer. To name few devices which are supported in this install image are Areca RAID controllers, Brocade 1010 and 1020 CNAs, Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card CNA, Intel 82580 and I350 NICs, Fusion-io ioDrive and QLogic CNAs. For full list of device drivers included in this release see VMware vSphere Hypervisor ESXi 5.0 Driver Rollup 2 Release Notes. vSphere Hypervisor ESXi 5.0 Driver Rollup 2 is available at this link.
vSphere 5 introduced support for utilizing multiple network interfaces per single host for vMotion transfer. This is very useful feature for systems which are limited to 1 Gigabit network as migrating multiple VMs off a host can take very long time with 1 Gigabit vMotion network. Multiple NIC vMotion also allow larger workloads to be migrated successfully when they could fail without in case of insufficient vMotion bandwidth. Taking advantage of multiple NIC vMotion requires having multiple vMotion vmkernel interfaces on each host. You need to assign unique IP address for each of those vmkernel interface and you should bind each vmkernel interface to a different uplink NIC. Configuring standard vSwitch for multi-NIC vMotionTo enable multiple NIC vMotion with standard vSwitch you could either use single vSwitch with multiple uplinks, or you could use multiple vSwitches with single uplink. a. Single vSwitch with multiple uplinks
b. Multiple vSwitches with single uplink vMotion vmkernel interfaceAdd new vmkernel interface and enable vMotion on it. vSphere 5 can load balance vMotion transfer over up 16 interfaces with 1 Gigabit NICs or up to 4 interfaces with 10 Gigabit NICs.
You can assign IP addresses from same subnet to all vMotion vmkernel interfaces, but IP address has to be unique on each interface.
Override switch failover orderIf you have multiple vmkernel interfaces on same vSwitch you need to assign dedicated uplink for each vMotion portgroup. Go to the “NIC Teaming” tab on portgroup settings, enable “Override switch failover order” and configure only single vmnic as “Active Adapters”, any other adapters should be set as “Unused Adapters”. Repeat this step for each vMotion vmkernel interface, assign unique vmnic adapter for each vMotion portgroup, eg. “vMotion 1” portgroup has “vmnic2” as active adapter and “vMotion 2” portgroup has “vmnic3” as active adapter.
Verifying multi-NIC vMotion functionalityESXi 5 hosts will take advantage of multiple vMotion interfaces automatically once they have been properly set. Any single vMotion will be load balanced on all vMotion interfaces you have configured. To verify that vMotion load balancing takes place check ESXi host vmkernel.log, you should see multiple connections for single vMotion session. Outgoing vMotion session
Incoming vMotion session
Before you implement this with standard vSwitches you might to want to read this article by Josh Townsend http://vmtoday.com/2012/02/vsphere-5-networking-bug-2-affects-management-network-connectivity/ Since vSphere 4.1 it has been possible to integrate ESXi user authentication with Active Directory. In vSphere 4.1 AD group which was use to grant root permissions on ESXi host was hard coded as “ESX Admins” so you had to change your AD group structure to match that. With vSphere 5 it is now possible to change which AD group members are granted root permissions on ESXi host, here is how. Open Advanced Settings of your ESXi host
In ESXi host Advanced Settings browse to Config –> HostAgent and you will see "Config.HostAgent.plugins.hostsvc.esxAdminsGroup” setting which you can change to match your preference. Change takes place within a minute or so, ESXi host reboot is not necessary.
Please note that each ESXi host will store esxAdminsGroup setting locally once any member in that group logs successfully to a ESXi host, setting is stored in ESXi host local permissions configuration (see screenshot below). If you change esxAdminGroup setting you have to make sure that you check local permissions on each ESXi host and remove any references to old AD group you might have previously used.
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