VMware released vSphere 5.1 at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco and with any new product release there are usually bumps on the road, compatibility issues and things that just don’t work. VMware vSphere 5.1 is no exception.

I have been part of many beta tests for other companies as well as several vSphere editions going back to 3.x. Not every configuration and product can be tested. The beta process does catch a lot of issues. The day software goes live without any issues every time, a lot of people will be without work..

I have decided to catalog a few of the known issues with the vSphere 5.1 release.

Perhaps the larges issue is that VMware View and vSphere 5.1 are not compatible yet.

Last Updated 09/30/2012

vSphere 5.1 and VMware View (all versions of View) 

VMware vSphere 5.1 is not currently supported with any versions of VMware View.

VMware vSphere 5.1 and EMC VMAX arrays.

Sphere 5.1 changes the behavior of VAAI Hardware Accelerated Locking (aka ATS) to no longer work with transient (sometimes on/sometimes off) ATS behavior, and older (i.e. non-current) versions of Enginuity will fail to create VMFS-5.

VMware vSphere 5.1 and EMC PowerPath V/E 

          **** Updated 09/26/2012 Resolved *** – Fix is out.

PowerPath/VE customers, hold off vSphere 5.1 upgrades (GA was yesterday).   Hotfix P02 from EMC is in days, and so is the expected VMware fix, follow the above link for more details on Chad Sakac’s blog post

VMware vSphere 5.1 and Synology DSM 4.1   ** Blog updated on 9/18/2012 **

Kendrick Coleman found an issue with the most recent release of DSM 4.1 and vSphere 5.1

It’s possible to mount both NFS and iSCSI datastores, but when you try to build or power on a VM, everything begins to halt when it needs to write to disk. If everything runs in memory (like mounting an ISO and beginning an OS installation), but when it comes to install the OS to disk, it begins to crawl. I checked the vmkernel log and here is what is shown. You can see that after I power on the VM, it gets binded to a port but when it tries to read from disk, there are all sorts of errors 

Update Manager 5.1 reports the compliance status as Incompatible when scanning or remediating ESXi 5.x hosts that belong to an HA cluster 

I personally ran into this issue when upgrading my lab – see Update Manager 5.1 Release Notes

CA Signed SSL Certificates may cause trouble with the upgrade process of vCenter.

From Michael Webster’s blog at http://longwhiteclouds.com/

I have heard unconfirmed reports of difficulties with the upgrade process of vCenter particularly with registering Inventory Service and SSO with vCenter when using CA Signed SSL Certificates. As I’m using CA Signed Certificates in my lab environment I will update this article when I have completed my upgrade.

Troubleshooting SSL certificate updates and Single Sign On (2033240)
vCenter Single Sign On installer reports: Error 29155. Identity source discovery error (2034374)

ESXi cannot distinguish between EagerZeroedThick & LazyZeroedThick
From Cormac Hogan’s Blog

ESXi cannot distinguish between thick provision lazy zeroed and thick provision eager zeroed virtual disks on NFS datastores with Hardware Acceleration support

 When you use NFS datastores that support Hardware Acceleration, the vSphere Client allows you to create virtual disks in Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed (zeroedthick) or Thick Provision Eager Zeroed (eagerzeroedthick) format. However, when you check the disk type on the Virtual Machine Properties dialog box, the Disk Provisioning section always shows Thick Provision Eager Zeroed as the disk format no matter which format you selected during the disk creation. ESXi does not distinguish between lazy zeroed and eager zeroed virtual disks on NFS datastores.

VMware vSphere 5.1 iPXE problems with AutoDeploy

 If you are having issues with IPXE and AutoDeploy please read Gabe’s Virtual World

VMware Support Insider: ALERT: Full disk on vShield Edge 5.1.x fails with error: VIX_E_DISK_FULL ERROR

Added 09/30/2012

VMware has become aware of an issue whereby vCloud Networking and Security 5.1 release can go into an Edge disk full state approximately 14 days after the first edge is deployed.

Symptoms include:

• In vCloud Director, attempting a reconfig fails with this error:VIX_E_DISK_FULL
• In vCloud Director, when looking at Edge Gateways, you receive this error:Edge VM backing the edge gateway is unreachable

For further updates and more information on this alert, refer to KB article:
Full disk on vShield Edge 5.1.x fails with error: VIX_E_DISK_FULL ERROR (2035939). 

Links for more information
vSphere 5.1 Important Upgrade Considerations by Michael Webster VCDX #66 

As with any upgrade please carefully consider especially before implementing in production. Reach out to your partners and trusted advisers for guidance so they can evaluate your environment to minimize issues.