I decided to present my personal rank of features in vSphere 5.1
- Virtual Distributed Switches, backup and restore – fantastic feature, at least on a paper 🙂 , for me number one, finally no need to have Virtual Standard Switches together with vDS. Wondering, if new version of PowerCLI will contain applets for getting networking configuration backup
- vMOTION between hosts without shared storage – awesome, I would like to see it in action, imagine migrating virtual machines from legacy virtual infrastructure to new one (new servers, new storage) no needs for additional zoning, just simply vMotion VM to new environment. This feature will be very useful in SMB’s solutions with standalone servers without costly shared storage. Looking forward to see it in action and check what are the limitations.
- vSphere Web client functionality – traditional vSphere client becomes very heavy, now around 250MB and takes out a lot of resources (memory) and Admins were tided to one platform (Windows). Fortunately, VMware follows a global trend and now vSphere Web Client becomes main tool for managing your kingdom.
- vDS operational improvements
- Network health check
- Management network rollback and recovery
- Distributed port – auto expand
- MAC address management
- Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) support
- Bridge Protocol Data unit filter
- VXLAN support – brilliant solution for service providers where there is a need to have more than 4095 VLAN’s
- SDRS support in vCloud Director.
- Agentless Antivirus and Antimalware
- Guest storage reclamation – question is, what’s the CPU overhead allocated with this operation ?
- vCenter server SSO (Single Sign-ON) – allows Administrators to authenticate against AD, OpenLDAP nad Local OS
- APD (all path down) and PDL (permanent device lost) handling – with vSphere 5.1, using settings Misc.APDHandlingEnable=1 and Misc.APDTimeout – is possible to set up ESXi host actions during APD event.
[box type=”info”] Click here to read more about new features in vSphere 5.1[/box]
