So, vSphere is out. I can’t say that I have noticed a huge difference from ESXi 3.5 to 4.0, but a few new features are always nice.

My test lab is updates to 4.0. I was a bit surprised to learn that my old Dell PowerEdge 2850 was capable of running ESXi 4.0, but indeed it does. It was less of a surprise to see that my R200′s also runs ESXi 4.0 without a hitch.

Upgrading from ESXi 3.5 to 4.0 on the R200′s were done by using av CD. The 2850 was upgraded with the new host upgrade utility. No problems there.

Actually, the upgrade process was performed without problems at at all. A bit boring.

Now, after a couple of weeks, some issues have surfaced. The first one is the obscene memory usage. VMware vCenter is using more than 2GB of RAM, where the tomcat6 process accounts for more than half of it. To illustrate how bad it is:

The tomcat6 is used to provide a web interface for VMware, and to provide some internal pages for the vCenter client. If you disable the web management service, the new performance graphs will be missing from the vCenter client, so will the hardware monitoring pages.

Now, spending 2GB of memory on some fancy graphs is not what I want. The hardware monitoring is actually implemented directly into the vCenter client if you connect directly to the ESXi host. So, why are they using the bloated web service to display it when using vCenter?