…is here!
Check out the new Storage Appliance (shared, clustered local storage)
built-in support for SSD
profile-driven storage
DRS-for-storage (where vSphere will move virtual machine files around based on storage performance)
The “Advanced” licensing is no more
VMs get up to 8 vCPUs unless you have Enterprise Plus – then VMs can have 32 vCPUs!
VMs can have up to 1TB of RAM.
You can now get NetFlow from distributed switches (wicked cool)
vCenter is available as an appliance instead of requiring Windows, and management is available via a browser again
Support for Apple products—vSphere 5 supports Apple Xserve servers running OS X Server 10.6 (Snow Leopard) as a guest operating system.
3D graphics for Windows Aero
USB 3.0 devices
RDMs larger than 2TB
extents up to 64TB
1MB unified block size
FiberChannel-over-Ethernet software adapter
True firewall for ESXi
an ESXi “shell” with enhanced commands ….
You can also now easily configure multi-core vCPUs for VMs (helps with licensing requirements)
More information is all over there web but I like the articles and videos Eric Sloof put together on his blog:
http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/
I’ll be posting more articles on 5 soon.
