vSphere 5.0 Features

By Duncan Epping, Principal Architect, VMware

When discussing vSphere 5.0 internally someone came up with the idea to list all new features that vSphere brings. Let me warn you that this is a long list, and the list could even be longer if we would have included all API changes and back-end changes.

Now before we will give you the full list we want to challenge you… Who will be the first one to show 50 of the below listed features in an article? We will give a "vSphere 5.0 Clustering Technical Deepdive" book signed by both authors to the first 5 people who manage to write a single article detailing 50 of the below features with short paragraph about what this feature brings including a screenshot. It's up to you to pick which features you want to show… Post a link in a comment and make sure you fill out a valid email address!

Here we go:

1. Storage DRS
2. Storage I/O Control for NFS
3. VMFS-5
4. ESXi Firewall
5. VMFS Scalability and Performance enhancements
6. 2TB+ pass-through RDM support
7. vCenter inventory extensibility
8. Storage APIs — VAAI T10 Compliancy
9. Storage APIs — VAAI Offloads for NAS
10. Storage APIs — VAAI Thin Provisioning
11. Storage APIs — Storage Awareness/Discovery
12. Storage APIs — Data Protection compatible with MN
13. APD, Permanent APD Survivability Enablement
14. Snapshot enhancements
15. Storage vMotion scalability improvements
16. iSCSI Enablement: iSCSI UI Support
17. iSCSI Enablement: Stateless Support
18. Multi-queue Storage IO adapters
19. Increase NFSv3 Max Share Count to 256
20. SATA 3.0
21. Software FCoE initiator support
22. Enhanced logging support
23. Enhanced Storage metrics
24. Profile-Driven Storage
25. Storage vMotion support for snapshots
26. vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA)
27. SSD Detection and Enablement
28. vSphere Replication
29. vSphere Data Recovery 2.0
30. VADP enhancements
31. vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) Enhancements
32. vCO — Library extension and consolidation
33. vCO — Scalability
34. Network I/O Control (NIOC) Phase 2
35. NIOC — User Defined Resource Pools
36. NIOC — HBR traffic type
37. NIOC — 802.1p tagging
38. Network Traffic Stats for iOPS
39. Improvement to UDP and Multicast traffic types
40. New networking drivers for server enablement
41. vDS support for Port mirror, LLDP and NetFlow V5
42. vDS Manage Port Group UI enhancement
43. Hot-Insert/Remove of Filters
44. Enhanced vMotion Compatibility
45. Storage vMotion support for Linked Clones
46. vMotion scalability (dual-NIC & longer latency support)
47. vNetwork API enhancements
48. vNetwork Opaque Channel
49. Support for 8 10GbE Physical NIC ports per host
50. Add Host Resources MIB to SNMP offering
51. Metro vMotion
52. Host Profile for DRS to support Stateless ESX
53. HA interop with agent VMs
54. DRS/DPM interop with agent VMs
55. DRS enhancements for Maintenance Mode
56. Enhanced processor support for FT
57. vSphere 5.0 HA aka "FDM / Fault Domain Manager"
58. vSphere HA – Heartbeat Datastores
59. vSphere HA – Support for partitions of management network
60. vSphere HA – Default isolation response changed
61. vSphere HA – New Status information in UI
62. vSphere HA – IPv6 support
63. vSphere HA – Application Awareness API publicly available
64. Extensions to create special icons for VMs
65. ESX Agent Management
66. Solution Management Plugin
67. Next-Gen vSphere Client
68. Host Profiles Enhancements
69. vCenter enhancements for stateless ESXi
70. vCenter Server Appliance
71. vCenter: Support for FileManager and VirtualDiskManager APIs
72. Virtual Hardware – Smartcard support for vSphere
73. Virtual Hardware Version 8
74. Virtual HW v8 — 1TB VM RAM
75. Virtual HW v8 — 32-way Virtual SMP
76. Virtual Hw v8 — Client-Connected USB Devices
77. Virtual HW v8 — EFI Virtual BIOS
78. Virtual HW v8 — HD Audio
79. Virtual Hw v8 — Multi-core Virtual CPU Support UI
80. Virtual HW v8 — New virtual E1000 NIC
81. Virtual HW v8 — UI and other support
82. Virtual HW v8 — USB 3.0 device support
83. Virtual HW v8 — VMCI device enhancements
84. Virtual HW v8 — xHCI
85. Support SMP for Mac OS X guest OS
86. Universal Passthrough (VMdirect path with vMotion support)
87. Guest Management Operations (VIX API)
88. Guest OS Support — Mac OS X Server
89. VM Serial Port to Host Serial Port Redirection (Serial Port Pass-Through)
90. VMware Tools Portability
91. VMRC Concurrent Connections enhancements
92. Scalability: 512 VMs per host
93. ESXCLI enhancements
94. Support SAN and hw-iSCSI boot
95. Hardware — Interlagos Processor Enablement
96. Hardware — SandyBridge-DT Processor Enablement
97. Hardware — SandyBridge-EN Processor Enablement
98. Hardware — SandyBridge-EP Processor Enablement
99. Hardware — Valencia Processor Enablement
100. Hardware — Westmere-EX Processor Enablement
101. Platform — CIM Enhancements
102. Platform — ESX i18n support
103. Host Power Management Enhancements
104. vCenter Web Client
105. Improved CPU scheduler
106. Improved scalability of CPU (NUMA) scheduler
107. Memory scheduler improvements to support 32-way VCPU's
108. Swap to host cache
109. API enhancements to configure VM boot order
110. VMX swap
111. Support for ESXi On Apple XServe
112. Redirect DCUI to host serial port for remote monitoring and management
113. UEFI BIOS Boot for ESXi hosts
114. Scalability — 160 CPU Threads (logical PCPUs) per host
115. Scalability — 2 TB RAM per host
116. Scalability — 2048 VCPUs per host
117. Scalability — 2048 virtual disks per host
118. Scalability — 2048 VMs per VMFS volume
119. Scalability — 512 VMs per host
120. Stateless — Host Profile Engine and Host Profile Completeness
121. Stateless — Image Builder
122. Stateless — Auto Deploy
123. Stateless — Networking Host Profile Plugin
124. Stateless — VIB Packaging Enhancement
125. Stateless — VMkernel network core dump
126. Host profiles enhancements for storage configuration
127. Enhanced driver support for ESXi
128. Intel TXT Support
129. Memsched policy enhancements w.r.t. Java balloon
130. Native Driver Autoload support
131. Root password entry screen in interactive installer
132. vCenter Dump Collector
133. vCenter Syslog Collector
134. VMware Update Manager (VUM) enhancements
135. VUM — Virtual Appliance enhancements
136. VUM — vApp Support
137. VUM — Depot management enhancements
138. vCLI enhancements
139. PowerCLI enhancements
140. VProbes — ESX Platform Observability

I warned you about it, it is a long list. Remember, first 5 who post a link to an article showing 50 of these new features and detailing what they do get a signed copy of vSphere 5 Clustering Tech Deepdive!