Well, after long wait, it is now available to the public. But hey, it is still not too late for some of you to know what are the new features come with v5 and the long list can be found in the vSphere Blog here. More to come but it will take sometime for someone to list it out.

Nevertheless, below are the first 50 new features available in v5:

1. Storage DRS - Perform ongoing load balance between storage based on available resources
2. Storage I/O Control for NFS - To gain much control (prioritization) on storage I/O for NFS datastore
3. VMFS-5 - New version of VMFS
4. ESXi Firewall - The stateless firewall in ESXi but wasn’t based on iptables
5. VMFS Scalability and Performance enhancements - Unified 1MB block size with larger single extent volume (max 64TB)
6. 2TB+ pass-through RDM support - Larger RDM support which more than 2TB (max 64TB)
7. vCenter inventory extensibility
8. Storage APIs — VAAI T10 Compliancy
9. Storage APIs — VAAI Offloads for NAS - allow NAS array offload certain storage operation to array
10. Storage APIs — VAAI Thin Provisioning - allow monitoring of space on thin provision array
11. Storage APIs — Storage Awareness/Discovery
12. Storage APIs — Data Protection compatible with MN
13. APD, Permanent APD Survivability Enablement
14. Snapshot enhancements - Snapshot consolidation for broken snapshot
15. Storage vMotion scalability improvements - Support VM with snapshot & linked clones (new mirroring technic)
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 - Level of storage based on capacity, performance, availability & etc
25. Storage vMotion support for snapshots - Possible to do storage vmotion for VM with snapshot
26. vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) - Linux appliance (SLES 11) provides with benefit of vMotion & HA without shared storage
27. SSD Detection and Enablement - SSD automatically detected, tagged and enabled by ESXi 5.0
28. vSphere Replication - Built-in vSphere replication, simple and cost efficient replication
29. vSphere Data Recovery 2.0
30. VADP enhancements
31. vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) Enhancements
32. vCO — Library extension and consolidation
33. vCO — vSphere Client integration - Third party application integration
34. vCO — Scalability
35. Network I/O Control (NIOC) Phase 2
36. NIOC — User Defined Resource Pools
37. NIOC — HBR traffic type
38. NIOC — 802.1p tagging
39. Network Traffic Stats for iOPS
40. Improvement to UDP and Multicast traffic types
41. New networking drivers for server enablement
42. vDS support for Port mirror, LLDP and NetFlow V5 - discover network devices, traffic monitoring & network troubleshooting
43. vDS Manage Port Group UI enhancement
44. Hot-Insert/Remove of Filters
45. Enhanced vMotion Compatibility
46. Storage vMotion support for Linked Clones
47. vMotion scalability (dual-NIC & longer latency support) - Multi NIC support (4x 10gE / 16x 1gE) & up to 10ms latency
48. vNetwork API enhancements
49. vNetwork Opaque Channel
50. Support for 8 10GbE Physical NIC ports per host

ariyossss

Just got the news today from one of my colleague and you can read here for more details. To get start with v5, you can start download it from here. I’ve been involved with the Beta version for the last two weeks and the only thing I can say is, v5 definitely beat previous vSphere version I had tried before.

ariyossss

This problem happened last time when we try to migrate a VM via vMotion from one host to another. The hardware was slightly different on the processor:

• Source: 2x HP Blade BL460c G5 (AMD Opteron 2356)
• Destination: 5x HP Balde BL460c G7 (AMD Opteron 6xxx)

As it was mentioned in this KB, this issue caused by NX flag setting and nothing to do with EVC mode at all. Although you can correct this per VM basis, I rather chose to enable this setting (AMD No eXecute (NX)) at the bios for both G5 hosts. After that, vMotion VMs from G5 to G7 and vice versa can be done without issue.
ariyossss