VMware 5.1 Product News

Today there was a general session of VMworld 2012 in San Francisco where Steve Herrod, CTO of VMware, announced new features and changes in their products.

The best of all is that changes in your product VMware vSphere leaves the vRAM licensing and focuses only on the socket licensing (physical CPU). In addition, customers who have Enterprise Plus licensing will be able to access the vCloud Director product without cost.

vSphere 5.1

• Calculation
  • It doubles the capacity of the virtual machine compared to the previous edition. Now the VM supports up to 64 vCPUs and 1TB of vRAM.
  • New virtual machine format (version 9) allows the “Monster VMs” performance monitors CPU and shared virtual graphics acceleration to improve performance.
• Storage
  • More efficient management of VDI storage with a new virtual disk format. This allows better balance performance against space consumption.
• Network
  • The distributed virtual switches (vDS) provide new features such as configuration backup and restoration, and other LACP.
  • SR-IOV support (Single-root I / O virtualization), allows a PCIe device is seen as multiple physical PCIe devices.
• Availability
  • vSphere vMotion can be executed without the need for shared storage.
  • vSphere Data Protection has been enhanced based on EMC Avamar solution that enables data backup to disk without the need for agent and deduplication.
  • Replication vSphere allows replication virtual machine storage regardless of manufacturer we use. Using the features available in SRM 5, we replicate our VMs by LAN or WAN with a gap up at least 15 minutes.
  • After upgrading the VMware Tools available with version 5.1, subsequent updates of VMware Tools does not require restarting the virtual machine.
• Security
  • VMware vShield Endpoint has been enhanced to integrate with third-party products and thus require no agents in the VMs and download all the tasks in a virtual appliance.
• Automation
  • vSphere Storage DRS and Profile-Driven Storage now integrates with vCloud Director to improve the efficiency of private cloud storage.
  • vSphere Auto Deploy has added two new deployment methods that provide higher availability than before.
• Management (with vCenter)
  • vSphere Web Client is now the “core” of management vSphere graphical virtual environment. With a new, more robust and simple interface, you can manage our infrastructure without vSphere Client. Now from an Internet Explorer or Firefox browser will make all our everyday tasks.
  • Single Sign-On vCenter simplifies user authentication before access to multiple layers of vCenter.
  • vCenter Orchestrator simplifies the installation and configuration of the heavy workload in vCenter. Now the configuration of workflows is simpler and can be launched from vSphere Web Client.

vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1 (VSA)

• You can handle more than 8 disks per ESXi host.
• You choose which disk space to be allocated for VSA, and the ability to dynamically increase storage used for VSA.
• A single vCenter can now manage multiple VSAs.
• Now you can have vCenter and ESXi hosts in different networks through support routing.
• VSA 5.1 you can deploy ESXi hosts that are already running virtual machines.

vCloud Director 5.1 (VCD)

• It has undergone numerous improvements which many of them are linked to improvements in vSphere 5. Since there are not many concrete, it is best to check the What’s New you can find in the link above.