Following yesterday's big vSphere 5.0 announcement I'm sure many of us are suffering from a bit of information overload. In order to help navigate through the many new features, and help acquaint everyone with 5.0, I thought it would be good here on the ESXi Chronicles to start our 5.0 journey by calling out a few of the more significant new features and capabilities related to the ESXi core platform. These include:
1. A new esxcli command that for the first time provides a standard CLI tool set for both local and remote administration of ESXi hosts. 2. A new service-oriented firewall with the capability to restrict access to services based on IP address and subnet mask. 3. The new vSphere 5.0 Image Builder that allows you to create and maintain custom ESXi installation images. 4. The new vSphere 5.0 Auto Deploy that leverages PXE boot to simplify ESXi hosts deployments in your environment 5. Using update Manager to fully automate upgrading from ESX/ESXi 4.x to ESXi 5.0.
Over the next several weeks I'll be posting a lot more information on each of these new features, for now a good place to start is by reading through the What's new in vSphere 5.0 Platform white paper.
I'm looking forward to sharing with you my insight on the many great things coming to the ESXi platform with vSphere 5.0.
