VMware vSphere and vCenter 5.1. Five key points

 

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.