I’m not going to bore you with all the mundane details about what is new, so many other folks are doing that, but here is a post from VMware which has links to pdfs as to what is new.
It looks pretty decent, the licensing change is welcome, though not everyone agrees with that. I find it interesting that the web console is going to be the main GUI to manage vSphere going forward. I found the web console in 5.0 severely lacking, but I’m sure it’s improved in 5.1. Anyone happen to know if the new console is backwards compatible with vCenter 5.0 ? Also I wonder if this web console applies to managing ESXi hosts directly (without vCenter)? I assume it doesn’t apply(yet) ?
I don’t see myself upgrading anytime before the end of the year, but it does seem strongly to me that this 5.1 release is what 5.0 should of been last year.
I find this race to a million iops quite silly, whether it is VMware’s latest claim of 1 million iops in a VM, or EMC’s latest claim, or HDS’s latest claim, everyone is trying to show they can do a million too, and the fine print always seems to point to a 100% read workload, maybe customers will buy their arrays with their data pre-loaded, so they don’t have to do any writes to them.
I still see Vcenter as being a product and feature. From the performance whitepaper:
vCenter Server Enhancements
vSphere 5.1 enables greater levels of consolidation and larger virtualized environments. As a result,
vCenter Server 5.1 has also been enhanced to provide better scalability and support for these larger
environments, reduce latency on vCenter Server database activities, and enable the collection of a
greater number of vSphere statistics.
vCenter Server 5.1 is now more efficient in how it does its statistics collection and processing. As a result, it is
now able to handle higher statistics collection levels for larger environments—up to 80 million statistics/hour—
which corresponds to collecting vCenter Server statistics at statistics level 4 for a massively large cloud
environment consisting of 1,000 vSphere hosts, 2,000 connected datastores and 10,000 powered-on
virtual machines.
I assume the web client just replaces the vsphere client that was a bit of a pain, it was probably easier to convert to an HTML 5 or Java app than port the client from WIndows to linux and mac. I’ll be curious if they also changed out the client for VCenter, which I assume they did… As a Mac/Linux guy I applaud this if it works well.
The memory optimizations look nice as well.
Overall I agree with your assessment this is what 5.0 should have been. I also applaud the removal of the vram entitlements, although, i do see the argument for a per VM costing model for cloud, however it doesn’t make sense for me to pay the same amount of money for a simple monitoring VM vs a production web node, just because i want DRS, HA, etc.
I still wish they would come out with an All You Can eat license that includes all the options, they’ll try to sell you on an ELA, but you still have to buy the additional things as Bundles, which defeats the whole purpose of an ELA.
Comment by Justin — August 27, 2012 @ 7:51 pm
Doing some further reading, the network enhancements are very welcome. Port Mirroring, Netdump, Netflow support…
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Whats-New-VMware-vSphere-51-Network-Technical-Whitepaper.pdf
Plus support for link aggregation and enhanced jumbo packet support on ISCSI adapters is very nice.
Comment by Justin — August 27, 2012 @ 7:57 pm