With the much anticipated release of VMware vSphere 5 only days away I thought I would take a look at some of the new key features & enhancements.
ESX is Dead
Hasta la vista service console. vSphere 5.0 has been built solely on the ESXi hypervisor architecture for improved reliability & security.
Auto Deploy ESXi Hosts
Rolling out ESXi Hosts via Auto Deploy will dramatically decrease the amount of time required to deploy ESXi to hundreds of servers. Auto Deploy uses a PXE boot infrastructure in
conjunction with vSphere Host Profiles to provision & customize that host.
Storage DRS
This is my favourite new feature & definitely one of the game changers within vSphere 5. We all know & love the functions DRS gave us at a virtual machine level. Storage DRS will provide benefits of resource aggregation, automated initial placement of virtual machines to avoid storage related bottlenecks via Storage vMotion. With VMware taking DRS to the storage level I/O & utilization performance bottlenecks on datastores in your virtual environment will no longer be an issue. *Storage DRS is only included within vSphere Enterprise Plus.
vStorage API for Storage Awareness (VASA)
VASA is a software based virtual SAN appliance that is made up of a minimum of 2 virtual machines. VASA allows storage arrays to provide vSphere with detailed information regarding its characteristics & increased details in regards to storage performance. Storage I/O control allows VMware administrators to set QoS priorities in the event of network or storage I/O contention. The VASA APis also allows for automated Storage vMotion of VMDKs (Storage DRS) around storage pools according to policies guaranteeing storage bandwidth for every virtual machine.
Profile Drive Storage
This new feature allows a defined set of storage tiers to be easily implemented for your virtual machines allowing the rapid intelligent provisioning of applications to relevant storage tier level.
Storage vMotion Snapshot Support
In vSphere 4 you could not Storage vMotion a virtual machine in snapshot mode with active snapshots. In vSphere 5 you can now Storage vMotion virtual machines between datastores in snapshot mode with active snapshots.
Increased resource availability for VMs. More = Better
vSphere 5 introduces virtual machine hardware version 8 which enables the following new & enhanced features:
- vCPU limit for a single virtual machine increases from 8 to 32
- 512 virtual machines can be hosted on a single ESXi Host with a maximum of 2048 vCPUs per ESXi Host
- vRAM limit for a single virtual machine increases from 255GB to 1TB (with new cost implications due to the changes in the vSphere licensing model for version 5 but more on that in a later post)
- Support for running ESXi on servers with 160 logical CPUs & 2TB of memory
- USB Support for devices connected to any PC or Laptop accessing virtual machines via the vSphere Web Client or Windows Client - Hurrah this is a function that pretty much every VMware admin has been asking for
- MAC OS-X 10.46 Support on Apple Xserve 3.1 systems
Larger LUNs
With the implementation of VMFS-5 in vSphere 5 you can now have datastores larger than 2TB. More details on how to migrate your datastores from VMFS-3 to VMFS-5 & the benefits in a later post.
vCenter 5.0 Server Backwards Compatible
vCenter 5.0 provides support for ESX/ESXi 3.5 & 4.x hosts. This is a great benefit as customers ESXi 5.0 upgrade projects can be carried out running vCenter 5.0 to manage their VMware environment during the upgrade project.
Web Based vSphere Client
A much improved web based vSphere client utilising Adobe Flex is being included within ESXi 5. This will also allow VMware administrators to easily manage virtualized environments on the road via smart phones & tablet PCs.
That's just a selection of the new features & enhancements within vSphere 5 which as you can see offers a lot of enhancements surrounding storage & increased resource availability for virtual machines. More on vSphere 5 to follow shortly.
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