As I was wading thru all of the new materials from yesterday, I thought it would be helpful to create a big list of all of the new features in vSphere 5.0. There were really only a few named in the presentation (or else the preso would have been 3 hours and put the analysts to sleep). While we wait for the release notes, I put together this list for you. This is not every new feature, but rather as many as I could find or remember. I’ve also added a quick blurb on what that feature does and my comments in parenthesis. If you are aware of something that I missed, please add in the comments below (with your own comments/opinions of course). Here we go:
VMware vSphere 5.0
- ESXi Convergence – No more ESX, only ESXi (they said they would do it, they meant it)
- New VM Hardware: Version 8 – New Hardware support (VS5 still supports VM Hardware 4 & 7 as well if you still want to migrate to the old hosts)
- 3D graphics Support for Windows Aero
- Support for USB 3.0 devices
- Platform Enhancements (Blue Requires Hardware v8)
- 32 vCPUs per VM
- 1TB of RAM per VM
- 3D Graphics Support
- Client-connected USB devices
- USB 3.0 Devices
- Smart-card Readers for VM Console Access
- EFI BIOS
- UI for Multi-core vCPUs
- VM BIOS boot order config API and PowerCLI Interface
- vSphere Auto Deploy – mechanism for having hosts deploy quickly when needed ( I’m going to wait and see how customers use this one.)
- Support for Apple Products – Support for running OSX 10.6 Server (Snow Leopard) on Apple Xserve hardware. (although I betting technically, you can get it to run on any hardware, you will just not be compliant in your license) Continue reading »