From What’s New in VMware vSphere 4.0:

Enhanced ESX Error Reporting — vSphere 4.0 gives you the ability to report per-host network, storage and VMFS issues to the vSphere Client in the Events tab. Each error event also provides a link to a specific Knowledge Base article that explains the event and provides detailed remediation steps to resolve the error. vSphere 4.0 also has the ability to set specific alarms for such events, with the help of the Events and Alarms feature. See vSphere Basic System Administration.

I experienced the feature firsthand recently while reconfiguring some physical switches in my lab, causing the following event:

Clicking the link took me to KB 1009542 with much more specific detail about the warning.

Very nice enhancement.

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You can think of the VM console like a remote KVM for virtual machines  — similar to HP iLO on a physical machine.  Most of the time there are more efficient network-based remote access techniques like RDP or SSH.  However, there are some circumstances — like network misconfiguration — that absolutely require the use of a remote console.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you were connected to a VM console while it automatically migrated with VMotion to another physical host?  If you are a long-time VMware admin, you would probably expect things to keep on working.  And that is exactly right — the console connection is seamlessly transferred to the new VMware ESX host.  This behavior is especially important when VMware DRS is dynamically moving virtual machines to optimize cluster resources.

Need to check the network settings of a VM?  No problem — you may not even notice if that VM migrates to another host while you are connected.

Here is a quick video of the situation in action:

Does Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 handle this scenario the same way?  Not exactly.

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