(The following is taken from a newsletter I produce for my clients that I’m pre-posting here on the blog.)
Back on July 12th, VMware unveiled the Cloud Infrastructure Suite which included vSphere 5.
As of a few minutes ago, vSphere 5.0 is available for download on the VMware website! (ESX 5.0 is build 469512 and vCenter Server 5.0 is build 456005)
The vSphere Support Center, Documentation Portal, and Community Portal have all been updated. I have also updated my VMW Launchpad.
vSphere 5 New Features
The blogosphere has been super active since the VSphere 5 announcement. Here is a sampling of some of the great work done by VMware community to highlight some of the great new feature available in vSphere 5:
- ESXi only form factor
- Monster Sized VMs (up to 32 vCPUs and 1 TB of RAM)
- VMFS-5: Which includes Unified 1MB File Block Size, Large Single Extend Volumes up to 64TB, Smaller Sub-Block, and Small File Support (Note VMFS volumes needs to be ugraded to v5 to obtain all these benefits and that can be done online and non-disruptively.)
- vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) – Which is implemented by Storage Vendors and is a 1.0 API which always has room to grow.
- Profile Driven Storage
- Storage DRS (SDRS)
- New HA architecture for expanded scalability
- vCenter Server Linux appliance
- vSphere Web Client (the future)
- Stateless ESXi Auto-Deploy
And many more. With over 200 new enhancements it’s hard to list all of the new features.
Cloud Infrastructure Suite
- vCloud Director 1.5 - Now with fast provisioning via Linked Clones and more.
- vShield 5 - new flow monitoring, L2 firewall, REST APIs, enhanced groupings
- vShield App with Data Security - Adds policy based management to protect sensitive data is not being shared inappropriately.
- Site Recovery Manager 5.0 - works with vCenter 5.0, vSphere (host) based replication, Automated Failback, and more.
- vCenter Heartbeat 6.4 - works with vCenter 5.0
- vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) 1.0 - New Product - allowing you to take local storage from up to 3 servers and turn that into a Virtual NAS. VSA is designed for the SMB users but can be useful for point deployments with the enterprise.
