This is a quick overview of the new features in vSphere 5 as well as what EMC is doing to enhance those new features.

New Features -

Hypervisor – ESXi is the only Hypervisor offered. Service Console is Gone – Smaller foot print, better security, single package. EMC has no dependencies on the Service Console.

vHardware – Supports 32 vCPU’s per VM & 1TB RAM – EMC doing this with a Huge DB app internally.

vSphere Storage Appliance – Use the local disks on servers as a pooled datastore. Each VSA supports up to 3 nodes, minimum of 2, and there is no User Interface. The datastore is simply just there. Very simple, just like the VNXe and the EMC VSI Plugins simply a migration to VNXe. Roughly the same cost, and you get Unisphere.

VAAI – Enhancements to Block and NAS. EMC supports this on VMAX and VNX Day 1. Q4 for Isilon.

Auto Deploy – Deploy Stateless Clusters from vCenter. EMC Powerpath VE for vSphere 5 built for stateless simplified licensing.

VASA -vStorage API for Storage Awareness – vSphere will know what the characteristics of the storage array. Very important for Storage DRS. Day 1 support across the EMC portfolio.

Storage DRS – Uses VASA information or administrative information to group datastores into datastore clusters, automating the initial placement of a VM, and then automatically redistributes them across the same grade of LUN’s /Filesystems dynamically to balance load. SIOC will be turned on by default with this. Other storage changes will include an expansion of VAAI, new virtual machine file system (VMFS-5), Storage I/O Control, storage vMotion enhancements, and NFS scale-out improvements. vSphere Automates initial placement of VM’s and vMotions them if needed. Combining this with EMC FAST gives customers simplified performance and cost with storage tiering, plus 10-100x better granularities.

VMware HA – Ground up re-write, improved designed with storage state and stretched clusters. Designed with VPLEX use cases, and collaborated on new stretched cluster HCL category.

Site Recovery Manger – Replicates VM’s natively. 15-60 Minute RPO. Very simple to use, and can replicate as little 1 VM. EMC’s replication takes advantage of this and is just as simple. It offers a consistency technology if there is a need to replicate multiple VM’s together. It can have any RPO, with automated Failback. No need to copy VM’s back and forth.

VS5 Licensing Model – Pooled vRAM Entitlement. Quick Understanding Licensing Video Here.

vRam = amount of virtual ram allocated to all powered on VM’s. No virtual machine will ever be counted higher than 96GB. The example would be, if you went to the full capacity of vRam on a VM (1TB) it would only be counted as 96GB.

Enterprise Plus – 96 GB Per Physical CPU

Enterprise – 64 GB Per Physical CPU

Standard – 32 GB Per Physical CPU

Essentials + - 32 GB Per Physical CPU

Essentials - 32 GB Per Physical CPU

vSphere Free - 32 GB Per Physical CPU

vSphere Desktop – Unlimited

Example – Customer with Enterprise Licensing

100 VM’s x 4GB of vRAM = 400GB vRAM

400 GB /32GB = 6 Licenses

PowerShell tool to determine how much vRam you are using. Run this before you go any further, complain, or move to Hyper-V. Just kidding

EMC + VMware Integration

EMC Integrates extremely well with vSphere 5. For the Top 10 reasons why you should run your VMware platform on EMC, see the brief below:

Top 10 Reasons — VMware on EMC