At long last, VMware heard the protesters. They've done away with vRAM licensing. During the keynote of VMworld when this was announced, there arose such a cheer that only a room full of virtual geeks would ever know. It was a miserable year for licensing since last VMworld, so I'm glad it's over.
First off, look at the What’s New for 5.1 here.
At any rate, to the meat and potatoes:
·
VI Client Deprecated
o
One of the bigger things that came out of VMworld for me was that
VMware is deprecating the VI client. If you've not used the Web Client, get
used to it now. They're moving that direction. One chink in the armor is that
if you need to work on an individual host, you still have to use the fat
client. Additionally, plugins will take a while to move over. I've not heard of
to many vendors making plugins for the web client. But VMware is developing new
features ONLY for the web client. So this is going to be a bit of a difficult
period of transition.
·
vCenter Single Sign-On
o
With the move to the web client, services are being broken out and
a snappy new Single Sign-On piece is being introduced. This will give you the ability to sign into
the web client once, and have access to everything VMware without signing in
again; vCOPS, vCloud, etc.
·
Single-root I/O virtualization
o
This is an interesting thing.
It allows the direct connection of NICs or HBAs to a VM bypassing the
Hypervisor. The VMworld session I
attended briefly talked about it, and the engineer said use it with
caution. It can introduce issues in the
VM, but if you’ll looking to squeeze every last I/O out of a VM, it may
improve performance.
·
Enhanced vMotion
o
vMotion WITHOUT THE NEED FOR SHARED STORAGE. That’s right kids. vMotion no longer needs shared storage. Essentially what happens is Enhanced vMotion
performs a Storage vMotion of the vdisks after the standard vMotion of memory
and processing. This all takes place
over the vMotion network, so plan accordingly.
·
vSphere Replication
o
So, have you been having trouble with EVA replication? Yeah, who hasn’t. Well, vSphere Replication has been moved out
of SRM and is not included with vCenter…ANY vCenter. So, do you have Essentials+ licenses? Guess, what.
You can use vSphere Replication.
SMBs rejoice! You can now
replicate to a secondary site. In
addition, rather than replicating at a LUN level (as you would have to with
storage based replication) you replicate at the VM level. Replicate a single VM, test SRM, lather,
rinse, repeat. Down side is, all this
processing is now taking place on your virtual infrastructure rather than the
storage processors. Some people will shy
away based on that.
·
Zero-downtime upgrade for VMware Tools
o
As of 5.1, VMware tools will not require a reboot. Now, you’ll still have to reboot getting
there. But that’s it…honest. What could go wrong?
·
Restructured vCenter databases
o
Apparently a DRASTIC improvement has been made to the vCenter
databases. Thing, improved performance,
improved storage, everything. The jury’s
still out on what happens when you UPGRADE your existing databases. You might need to rebuild from scratch and
import configuration (loosing statistics) to get the improvements.
·
Increased VM maximums
o
64 vCPUs, 1TB vRAM (super-monster VMs)
So, that’s the interesting points. Anyone finding something else interesting in the new release?
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