Novell PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2 Release Notes

March 07, 2011

1.0 Overview

The information in this Release Notes document pertains to Novell PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2.

For instructions on downloading and upgrading to PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2, see “Upgrading to PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2” in the Novell PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2 Getting Started Guide.

For administrative tasks, see the Novell PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2 User Guide.

This product contains undocumented utilities that Novell Support might use to diagnose or correct problems.

2.0 Readme Updates

The following table contains information on the documentation content changes that were made in this Readme after the initial release of PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2:

Table 1 Readme Updates

Date

Readme Item Added or Updated

March 07, 2011

Added a known issue, Monitoring of Windows Server 2003 might increase memory utilization on the server .

3.0 New Features in This Release

PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2 includes the following new features and enhancements:

  • You can install PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2 Server and PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2 Client on Windows Server 2008 SP2 (32-bit).

  • You can install PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2 Server and PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2 Client on a Windows 2003 SP2 (32-bit) virtual machine that runs on SLES 11 (32-bit) XEN in a non-clustered environment.

  • PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2 supports discovery, inventory, and data collection (monitoring) for the following machines:

    • Windows Server 2008 SP2 (32-bit, 64-bit)

    • Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit)

    • Windows Server 2008 SP2 Hyper-V (64-bit)

    • Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V (64-bit)

    • VMware ESX Server 4.1,4.1i (64-bit)

    • VMware Virtual Center 4.1

  • PlateSpin Recon users can now monitor Linux (RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu, CentOs, and SLES with Xen) and Citrix XenServer machines by using sudo user credentials.

  • PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2 supports PlateSpin Portability Suite 8.1.2 and 8.1.3 in addition to PlateSpin Portability Suite 8.0.0.

  • You can now deploy Windows disk counters as an add-on on target Windows machines for which you want to collect disk utilization counters. You can undeploy the add-on from the target machines if you do not want to collect disk utilization counters at a later time.

    For detailed information on deploying and undeploying Windows disk counters, see the Collecting Disk Utilization Counters for Windows Machines section in the Novell PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2 User Guide.

  • You can now generate the following two new reports that show the alignment status of the disk partitions:

    • VM Host Partition Alignment Report

    • VM Partition Alignment Report

    For detailed information about the VM disk partition alignment reports, see the VM Disk Partition Alignment Reports section in the Novell PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2 User Guide.

4.0 Product Issues

4.1 Issues Resolved by PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2

The following issues that were discovered in the previous releases of PlateSpin Recon have been resolved in this release:

  • The Summary Statistics table is not displayed when you export a report to HTML, File, or RTF file format.

  • When you manually export a report into the Excel format, the gigabyte values are converted into bytes or some data might be displayed as System.Err.

  • Issues related to monitoring Windows machines have been resolved. The issues include:

    • The Monitoring service is stopped unexpectedly.

    • Monitoring terminates the Remote Registry service.

  • When you inventory machines under Workgroup, a few machines are listed in the workgroup.com filter instead of the workgroup filter.

  • Inventory of Windows domain with organizational unit filter fails with the following error: Unknown error (0x80005000).

  • Forecast values do not change for reports with different days.

  • Disk IO % Peak value is 0 if the target machine has multiple disks.

  • Unable to export data in snapshot for an hypervisor when you monitor the virtual machines that run on the hypervisor.

  • When you import a snapshot from a network path, the data is not imported.

  • Unable to view chart data for any machines from the PostgreSQL database.

  • Physical and logical disk counters display the Category does not exist error.

4.2 Continuing Issues in PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2

Some of the issues that were discovered in the original shipping version of PlateSpin Recon 3.7 and PlateSpin Recon 3.7.1 have not yet been resolved. For continuing issues, review the following:

4.3 Known Issues in PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2

4.3.1 The value of the Network Adapter Speed is incorrectly displayed for an inventoried Hyper-V machine

When you inventory a Hyper-V machine that has an Ethernet network adapter of 10 GB or more, the speed property of the adapter gets an incorrect value regardless of the actual link speed because of the data type conversion. The value of the network adapter speed for the Hyper-V machine is displayed as 1 Gbps in the Hyper-V properties dialog box in the PlateSpin Recon Client.

Workaround: None.

4.3.2 Some of the information displayed on the PlateSpin Recon Client Start page might not match with the information displayed in the Data Center Explorer

The information about the following items on the PlateSpin Recon Client Start page might not match with the information displayed in the Data Center Explorer:

  • Discovered Devices

  • Items with Warnings

  • Unresponsive Items

Workaround: None.

4.3.3 There might be delays in data collection when you monitor more than 500 machines from the PlateSpin Recon Server installed on Windows 2003 SP2

Workaround: To improve the performance of the PlateSpin Recon Server, you can fine-tune the Monitoring Service configuration parameters. For detailed information on fine-tuning the parameters, see the Best Practicessection in the Novell PlateSpin Recon 3.7.2 User Guide.

4.3.4 Monitoring of Windows Server 2003 might increase memory utilization on the server

When you monitor Windows Server 2003, the memory utilization on the monitored server might increase because the memory usage of the Svchost.exe process increases when other users remotely collect performance data about the monitored server.

Workaround: This is a known issue of Windows Server 2003. To troubleshoot the issue, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article ID 969701.