Vinternals has released a new ESX post install tool called Statelesx (meaning stateless ESX). This tool is designed to take all of the work into configuring an ESX after install, including the vSwitches, port groups and IP addressing.
http://www.vinternals.com/2008/08/statelesx-110-released.html
Good Citrix support article on troubleshooting DA registration with DDCs.
VMware released update 2 for ESX last week and there some very cool new features. In my opinion they should have called this 3.6. Here are some highlights.
Enhanced VMotion Compatibility – Simplifies VMotion compatibility issues across CPU generations. Enhanced VMotion compatibility (EVC) automatically configure server CPUs with Intel FlexMigration or AMD-V Extended Migration technologies to be compatible with older servers. After EVC is enabled for a cluster in the VirtualCenter inventory, all hosts in that cluster are configured to ensure CPU compatibility for VMotion. VirtualCenter does not permit the addition of hosts that cannot be automatically configured to be compatible with those already in the EVC cluster.
VSS quiescing support – When creating quiesced snapshot of Windows Server 2003 guests, both filesystem and application quiescing are supported.
Display of system health information – More system health information is displayed in VI Client for both ESX Server 3.5 and VMware ESX Server 3i.
Live Cloning of Virtual Machines – VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2 provides the ability of creating a clone of a powered-on virtual machine without any downtime to the running virtual machine. Therefore, administrators are no longer required to power off a virtual machine in order to create a clone of it.
For complete list of new features and fixes take a look at the release notes.
http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/vi3_esx35u2_vc25u2_rel_notes.html
Jeremy Waldrop's Blog 