ESXi 5.1 Updates
Recently announced at VMWorld 2012, vRAM entitlements (or tax :) ) have been removed from ESXi 5.1, good news for SMB’s. Apparently vRAM is now considered a dirty word in VMware :)
What else is included in the new release:
New backup product – vSphere Data Protection, VDP replaces the current VDR. Agentless, disk based backup architecture still uses vSPhere API for data protection alongside change block tracking. Also included is a rather natty de-duplication engine to optimise backups.
Enhanced vMotion – vMotion across servers with only local storage, making this a cheap alternative for SMB’s looking to implement a fully HA environment without the cost of administrative overhead of a shared storage platform.
vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1 – capacity per node has been increased, upto 27TB across 3 hosts, 12 disks per host is now supported with raid 5 support. A big plus, vCenter can be run directly on the VSA cluster, unlike previous versions of the VSA’s. You can now resize the VSA’s after deployment and convert from different types of RAID, and a bunch of performance improvements have been made to improve the balance between VM I/O and the sync I/O between VSA’s.
vSphere Essentials Plus feature updates – now includes a VSA license, vShield Endpoint, vSphere Replication & Hot Add, which makes this a bit of a no brainer purchase for those SMB’s that want to move into the virtualised environment with all the goodies they could want for HA and DR (well, the majority at least!)
More information to come!
