VMware vSphere 5 News

VMware vSphere 5 details

Beth Pariseau from Techtarget and Kenneth van Surksum from Virtualization.info is reporting some of the possible upcoming VMware vSphere 5 details. Here are some of the speculated details:

• Build on the vSphere ESXi hypervisor architecture
• vSphere Auto Deploy combining host profiles, Image Builder and PXE
• Unified CLI framework, allowing consistency of authentication, roles and auditing.
• Support for up to 1 TB of memory
• Support for 32 vCPU’s per VM
• Nonhardware accelerated 3D graphics for Windows Aero support
• USB 3.0 device support
• UEFI virtual BIOS
• Host EUFI boot support
• New GUI to configure multicore vCPUs
• Client-connected USB devices
• Smart card reader support for VMs
• Apple Mac OS X Server 10.6 (Snow Leopard) guest OS support
• Support for up to 512 VMs
• Support for up to 160 Logical CPUs and 2 TB or RAM
• Improved SNMP support
• Storage driven storage delivery based on the VMware-Aware Storage APIs
• Improved version of the Cluster File System, VMFS5
• Accelerator for specific use with View (VDI) workloads, providing a read cache optimized for recognizing, handling and deduplicating VDI client images.
• iSCSI user interface support
• Storage APIs - Array Integration: Thin Provisioning enabling reclaiming blocks of a thin provisioned LUN on the array when a virtual disk is deleted
• Swap to SSD
• 2TB+ LUN support
• Storage vMotion snapshot support
• vNetwork Distributed Switch improvements providing improved visibility in VM traffic
• ESXi Firewall protecting the ESXi 5.0 management interface
• A browser-based, fully-extensible, platform-independent implementation of the vSphere Client based on Adobe Flex.
• vCenter Server Appliance
• Inventory Extensibility: providing a manager to monitor partner extensions.
• vCenter Solutions Manager, providing a consistent interface to configure and monitor vCenter-integrated solutions developed by VMware and third parties.
• System message logging enhancements
• Revamped VMware High Availability (HA) with Fault Domain Manager
• All hosts in cluster can be primary nodes
• Cluster also uses shared storage as a channel for heartbeat detection

During the Partner Exchange conference, several improvements to vSphere were presented including Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler, host-based replication and several other new features. vSphere 5 will be out in the second half of this year, but the release will be before VMworld, according to VMware product managers who led the roadmap session. That puts the vSphere 5 release date in July or August. The subsequent vSphere release, due in 2012, is expected to add a service-level agreement (SLA) framework and long-distance vMotion.

Storage DRS
Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) will use Storage vMotion to perform automatic load balancing if a disk becomes overloaded. Storage DRS users will be able to define groups of data stores, called “storage pods,” that will automatically load-balance based on capacity. Users can then provision virtual machines (VMs) to specific storage pods rather than to specific data stores

Host-based replication in vSphere 5
The vSphere 5 roadmap also includes host-based replication for Site Recovery Manager (SRM). This feature is designed for organizations that don’t use array-based storage replication, or use different types of storage at different sites. The replication will be asynchronous and be able to protect individual VMs, he said.