vSphere 5.1 My Take On What's New/Key Features

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With the release of vSphere 5.1, it's been tough keeping up with all the tweets and information from VMworld 2012 San Francisco.

With the plethora of data, I thought it would be handy to blog about what the key features that will have the biggest impact on my every day life.

Licensing

vRAM - It's gone, licensing is back to per physical processor.

vSphere Essentials Plus - Now includes vSphere Storage Appliance and vSphere Replication.

vSphere Standard - Now includes vSphere Storage Appliance, vSphere Replication, Fault Tolerance, Storage vMotion and vCentre Operations Manager Advanced.

Read more here

 

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I thought they dropped Essentials Plus from the licencing options a few version ago and simplified it down to 3 versions Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise+?

 

No mate, think you are thinking about Advanced which was dropped at 4.1. Customers who had this get a free upgrade to Enterprise if they are in production support.

 

The vmotion feature could actually be a big game changer, not needing central storage does suddenly make the whole virtualization band wagon a whole lot cheaper for SMB's to dip their toes in if they have not already.

 

This is my take on that, I think the Essentials Plus, doesnt give you HA without central storage, I think it gives you a vSphere Storage Appliance.

Have to fire some stuff up in a lan to confirm 100%.

 

No thats true without central storage but depending on work load and capacity you might be able to rig up replication to work to provide some quick failback, as I say not really recommended but just for toe dipping it might do the job!

 

Just a couple of quick questions then, which you might have a better understanding of than me...

How will vmotion work without shared storage? Probably a bit tired at the mo to think about it properly

Also, is it likely to be a 5.1 update for the ESXi host, and vcenter / vsphere client etc?

 

Vmotion will have a tighter intergration with storage vmotion, which at present is not available in the essentials plus licence. What essentially that means is that by performing one vmotion operation not only will it copy the memory to another host and allow it to take control it will also copy the physical files that make up the virtual machine across the network onto another host at the same time. VMware have a rather nice whitepaper on the new process here http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMware-vSphere51-vMotion-Perf.pdf . This ties in nicely with the new feature introduced in vsphere 5 of being able to use multiple network cards for vmotion traffic.

This will also be available in the essentials plus licence which is really handy as many a time it would have been great to use svmotion within an essentials plus environment or all the times you install it from new and not put the licence key in until the last minute! ;)

The update to 5.1 will be a new ESXi version and Vcenter version, also the VI client will need upgrading although as they are trying to move towards a web interface only administration environment I'm not sure how many new clicky bits n bob's will be added to the vi client.

 

Some features will not be available on the VI client and only available on the web client. They stopped putting much effort into the VI client and concentrated mainly on the web client. My guess by version 6, VI client will either be barely used or not available at all.