What's New in vSphere 5?
- Licensing Changes - Find out what has changed and how it may affect your company.
- New Features - Enhancements, features, and upgrades over vSphere 4.
There has been a lot of talk about the changes to vSphere 5, but one thing remains the same: VMware is the industry leading virtualization platform.
vSphere 5 builds on the ESXi platform with additional management, monitoring, and performance tools to enable businesses to have even more confidence running their mission critical applications. With vSphere 5 there are many new features as well as a few changes in the licensing program.
VMware vSphere 5 Overview:
Businesses of all sizes are continuously facing greater IT challenges. While IT budgets and staff sizes are shrinking, the need for Always On IT (a platform for the high availability, reliability, and manageability of enterprise-class operations) is growing. End users require more uptime on their applications to perform their job, and business owners and decision makers require profitable revenue growth. To balance these two priorities, many small, medium, and large businesses are turning to VMware vSphere. VMware vSphere allows organizations to maintain day-to-day business operations while still having time to invest in new strategic projects that can yield longer-term efficiencies to help the business grow.
vSphere has many tools available that allow fewer administrators to perform the needed management tasks, as compared to a traditional one application per server infrastructure. By abstracting each operating system from the hardware, it allows administrators to provision new applications and accelerate change request response times from hours, days or weeks to just minutes. VMware vSphere can even cut costs by utilizing virtualization technology for storage, server and networking resources to reduce business expenses by 50% or more (per application). These cost savings are realized through reducing hardware, energy and maintenance costs, while VMware vSphere enables the remaining investments to be utilized efficiently.
Reduce your capital and operating costs and increase control over IT infrastructures while preserving the flexibility to choose any OS, application and hardware with VMware vSphere.
- Shift your IT staff's energies toward creating transformative business solutions with built-in automation and resource elasticity
- Get more from your existing IT assets and reduce capital expenses of the datacenter by up to 60%
- Significantly lower power, cooling and real estate needs and cut your energy costs by up to 80%
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| vSphere Edition Comparison | Standard | Enterprise | Enterprise Plus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overview | Scalable server consolidation & no planned downtime | Powerful & efficient resource management | Policy-based datacenter automation |
| Product Components | |||
| Processor Entitlement | 1 Processor, unlimited cores | 1 Processor, unlimited cores | 1 Processor, unlimited cores |
vRAM EntitlementAmount of vRAM that each license adds to the available pool. vRAM is the amount of virtual memory configured to a virtual machine. |
32GB | 64GB | 96GB |
vCPU EntitlementThe number of virtual CPUs that may be allocated to each VM when using virtual symmetric multiprocessing (vSMP) |
8-Way | 8-Way | 32-Way |
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMwareQualified purchases of VMware vSphere entitle to free use of enterprise Linux (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware) as guest OS. This offer includes free subscription to patches & updates of the OS and ability to run unlimited number of virtual machines per vSphere license. |
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| Product Features | |||
Thin ProvisioningReduce storage needs by utilizing dynamic storage that expands to meet the requirements of the virtual machine with no performance degradation. |
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Update ManagerReduce time spent on routine remediation by automating the tracking, patching and updating of your vSphere hosts, as well as the VM's applications and operating systems. |
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vStorage APIs for Data ProtectionAchieve scalable backup without disrupting applications or users by leveraging supported 3rd party backup software that leverages these APIs. Through this integration supported 3rd party backup software can perform centralized VM backups without the disruption and overhead of running backup tasks from inside each virtual machine. |
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Data RecoveryProtect your data through fast agent-less backups to disk, with de-duplication to minimize use of backup disk space. |
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High AvailabilityMinimize downtime with automated restart of your VMs following physical machine failure. |
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vMotionEliminate application downtime from planned server maintenance by migrating running VMs between hosts. |
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Virtual Serial Port ConcentratorConnect over the network via the serial port concentrator to the serial port console on any server. |
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Hot AddIncrease capacity by adding CPU and memory to virtual machines when needed without disruption or downtime. |
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vShield ZonesSimplify security management by configuring and maintaining your multiple zones of security within software among shared hosts rather than across separate siloed physical environments. |
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Fault ToleranceProvide continuous availability for applications with zero data loss in the event of server failures. |
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Storage APIs for MultipathingImprove performance and scalability by leveraging efficient array-based operations. |
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Storage vMotionAvoid application downtime for planned storage maintenance by migrating live VM disk files across storage arrays. |
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Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and Distributed Power Management (DPM)Align resources usage with business priority by automatically load balancing across hosts and optimize power consumption by turning off hosts during lower load periods. |
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Storage I/O ControlPrioritizes storage access by continuously monitoring I/O load of a storage volume and dynamically allocating available I/O resources to virtual machines according to business needs. |
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Network I/O ControlPrioritizes network access by continuously monitoring I/O load over the network and dynamically allocating available I/O resources to specific flows according to business needs. |
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Distributed SwitchCentralize provisioning, administration, and monitoring using cluster-level network aggregation. |
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Host ProfilesSimplify host deployment and compliance by creating VMs from configuration templates. |
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Auto DeployDeploy more vSphere hosts in minutes and "on the fly". |
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Storage DRSAutomated load balancing now looks at storage characteristics to determine the best place for a given virtual machine's data to live when it is created and then used over time. |
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Profile-Driven StorageReduce the steps in the selection of storage resources by grouping storage according to a user-defined policy. |
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