vSphere 5.1 Whats New - Platform

User access

VMware have significantly increased the Web based platforms usability and now recommend that the web portal is how the vSphere environment is managed.  This will cause a large number of users upset as moving away from the thick client is not something many users will want to do.

VMware have also introduced the usage of more than one root account for ESXi for the first time.  This will allow for administrators to have there own logins to the console.  This is to assist with tracking configuration changes in much more detail. 

Hardware Accelerated Graphics

This is a feature that will be utilized in the next release of VMware View.  This feature is not likely to be used in in server installations, and is intended to provide better graphics performance for VDI.  The VMware documentation describes the feature below.

With vSphere 5.1, VMware has partnered with NVIDIA to provide hardware-based vGPU support inside the virtual machine. vGPUs improve the graphics capabilities of a virtual machine by off-loading graphic-intensive workloads to a physical GPU installed on the vSphere host. In vSphere 5.1, the new vGPU support targets View environments that run graphic-intensive workloads such as graphic design and medical imaging. Hardware-based vGPU support in vSphere 5.1 is limited to View environments running on vSphere hosts with supported NVIDIA GPU cards (refer to the VMware Compatibility Guide for details on supported GPU adapters). In addition, the initial release of vGPU is supported only with desktop virtual machines running Microsoft Windows 7 or 8. Refer to the View documentation for more information on the vGPU capabilities of vSphere 5.1. NOTE: vGPU support is enabled in vSphere 5.1, but the ability to leverage this feature is dependent on a future release of View. Refer to the View documentation for information on when this feature will be available.

 

Improved CPU virtualization

Improvements have been made to CPU virtualization allowing for more information of the CPU architecture to be exposed to the VM better. This allows for the VMs to have near native access to the CPUs and allow for advanced OS features to run more successful.

Auto Deploy

There have been two new modes added to auto deploy.  However I still anticipate that uptake on this feature will be slow until the new release of vSphere.

Stateless caching mode is a new mode where if the host cannot boot from the PXE network due to a failure of some sort, it will boot from a backup image located on local media.  In normal mode caching mode operates the same as stateless mode deploying an image over the network to the host to run from a memory RAM drive.  However another step is performed in caching mode where that the image deployed to the hosts memory is then written to the internal boot device, HD, SD card or USB stick.  This then makes sure the host can boot in the case of a PXE boot failure.

The second mode that was added to auto deploy was Stateful install mode.  This mode is used to actually install the ESXI image onto the local media of the host.  This is very similar to the Stateless caching however the difference is that the boot order of the BIOS should be changed on the host.  The host only needs to PXE boot once from the Auto Deploy sever to install the ESXi image and then should boot from the local media after.