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It looks good, and it feels fast. Rebooting a VM takes 9 seconds, which is faster than ever. No need to schedule maintenance windows any more (not that I did anyway ).

Network interface configuration and DNS resolution

Things have changed. Both interface configuration and name resolution configuration are now done in /etc/network/interfaces. There is a new flag for autoconfiguration, so no need to echo things to /proc anymore. For our dual stack staticly configured servers the configuration looks like this:

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Note that despite the comment on the second line (see interfaces(5)), not everything is explained there. You have to look at resolvconf(8) as well: all the options that used to be available to resolv.conf, can be put in interfaces, if you prefix them with "dns-". Take care that instead of configuring multiple nameserver-lines, they are now on one dns-nameservers line.

There is a bug that effectively overrides the privext value with what's in /etc/sysctl.d/10-ipv6-privacy.conf. You have to work around it by commenting out the two lines there.

VMware tools

Our setup consists of VMware ESXi 4.1 boxes, and I configured the Precise VMs with a vmxnet3 NIC, and a paravirtualised SCSI hard disk, and the linux-image-virtual kernel.

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I will run some test to see which scenarios allow VCB to make backups.

/sbin/halt doesn't power off any more

This bug functionality change appears to have been introduced in 11.10, but because I only use LTS I didn't find out until now.

Easy workaround: issue "halt -p".