Whats New In vSphere 5.1 - High level overview

Compute Resource

There have been several increases in the compute resource for vSphere 5.1

• VMs now support 64 vCPU’s
• VMs Now support 1TB of RAM
• Virtual Machine Hardware levels 9 supports these larger virtual machine configurations as well as provide enhancements in vCPU counters and improves graphics with a new hardware accelerator.
• Hosts can support up to 256 physical CPUs.

Storage Resource

There have been several improvements to the way storage is handled by vSphere 5.1 some are focused on providing better performance within vSphere for virtual machines.  However some are focused on removing some limitations of the new VMFS 5 file system.

• Increase in number of hosts able to share a read only file has increased from 8 to 32. 
• Introduction of new VMDK type, SE virtual disk (Space –efficient virtual disk)
• Improvements in detecting APD (all paths down) and PDL (permanent device loss)
• Software FCoE boot support has been added along with improvements to the software FCoE HBA
• VAAI (vStorage API for Array integration) has been improved for NFS, targeted specifically at VDC and VDI to offload creating of linked clones.
• Additional troubleshooting tools added to esxcli for storage related troubleshooting.
• SSD monitoring using SMART based plugin to identify media detrition.
• SIOC (Storage IO Control) now detects the correct latency level for each datastore, instead of using the default 30ms
• Storage DRS V2.0 – Now interacts with VCD.  Storage DRS can now detect linked clones, and VCD can now see the datastore clusters.  Improvements in both product ranges. 
• Storage vMotion Parallel migrations.  Storage vMotion cannot migrate 4 virtual disk files at the same time.  This is an improvement over the serial (single file at a time) migration technology used in 5.0.

Networking

There have been several improvements made to VMware’s Distributed Switch.  All items listed here are in reference to VDS and no changes have been made to VMware Standard Switches (VSS)

• A Network Health check feature has been added to check VLAN, MTU and Network Teaming settings on a regular bases for configuration errors
• VDS backup and restore of configuration for the VDS
• Management network rollback and recovery has been added, as well as the ability to manage the VDS from each hosts DCUI
• Static port binding option of the VDS portgroup has the Auto Expand option enabled by default.  This needed to be enabled manually on previous versions of vSphere.
• Dynamic port binding option of the VDS portgroup will be removed after this release of vSphere.
• MAC addresses are now more flexible, the 64K MAC address limitation has also been removed to allow VCD environments to scale larger.
• Dynamic LACP (LINK Aggregation Control Protocol) is now fully supported.  Previous versions only support static link aggregation. 
• Bridge Protocol Data Unit Filter, has been added to VDS.  VM’s forwarding BPDU packets to the physical switches and prevents the switch from disabling ports due to these packets.
• Netflow version 10 (IPFIX) is now supported on VDS
• Port Mirroring RSPAN (Remote Switch Port Analyzer) and ERSPAN (Encapsulated Remote Port Analyzer) is now supported on VDS
• Enhanced SNMP support for v1, v2 and v,3
• Single Root I/O Virtualization, support for this function has been increased in vSphere 5.1

 

vSphere Platform

Serveral changes were made to the platform with the sole intention of improving support, management and monitoring of the vSphere environment.  This included increasing the support for SNMP.  It has been detailed that VDS now supports SNMP v1, v2 and v3, this also applies for the hosts and the vCenter.

• Local ESXi accounts are automatically given shell and root access.  Removed the usage for a shared root account and makes monitoring shell usage simpler.
• All host activity from both the DCUI and the shell is now logged DUCI access was never logged in previous versions.
• vMotion allows for the virtual machine state (memory and CPU) to be migrated simultaneously with a sVmotion operation of the machines vmdk and vmx files.  This is a massive advantage for environments whit no shared storage.  Machines can be migrated between hosts with local storage.
• Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 supported added.
• vShield Endpoint is now included in VMware tools and allows vShield to be used for agentless AV and Malware protection from selected AV vendors.
• VMware View environments can now gain better graphic support if the ESXi hosts are using a supported NVIDIA graphics adapter.  This provides hardware bases vGPU support the View hosted VMs.  This feature will be available in the next release of View.
• Improved CPU virtualization, referred to as virtualized hardware virtualization, allows near native access to the CPU features.
• More Low level CPU counters are available to the VMs OS to allow for better troubleshooting and debugging from inside the VM.
• Auto Deploy has two new deployment modes, Stateless Caching Mode, and Stateful Install Mode
• VMware tools can be upgraded with no downtime. Once VMware tools are upgraded to the version that ships with vSphere 5.1 future upgrades do not require a reboot.
• vSphere replication is now an optional component available outside of SRM.

vSphere Data Protection is another added feature to provide instant recovery of virtual machines