In this post we will discuss about the features and
innovations introduced in VMware vSphere 5.1. We will explore the most 5 important
ones.
1) vSphere Web Client
vSphere 5.1 has many new or enhanced features, but without a doubt the most important is vSphere
Web Client, that allows administrators
ready access to information, and delivers a more robust and flexible platform.
2) vSphere Replication
This functionality allows host-based VM
replication, a feature previously made available with VMware Site Recovery
Manager 5.0, and now available at the hypervisor level for customers with
Essentials Plus licensing or higher. Both
Small Business and Large Enterprise will find this a welcome feature to save
money expanding virtualization to branch offices with the ability to implement
some form of disaster recovery.
3) vSphere Data Protection
This joint collaboration with EMC is based on Avamare and provides for backup
and de-duplication capabilities leveraging vSphere APIs for Data Protection.
This serves as a replacement to the vSphere disaster recovery appliance.
4) vSphere Platform
The welcome one is the integration
of VMware vShield Endpoint, which is now bundled within the hypervisor. This offer
significant scalability enhancements by leveraging agentless antivirus and
anti-malware, and offloading that out of the VM and onto host-based virtual appliances.
Another popular one is Enhanced vMotion, which enables live migration of VMs
between hosts without the need for shared storage.
5) VM Enhancements
hardware-accelerated 3D graphics support. This is a
platform enhancement intended for VMware View and aimed at VMs that require
heavy graphics-intensive applications leveraging vGPU technology. This effort
is in collaboration with NVIDIA and only a limited number of GPU models are
supported.
