What’s new in ESX 3.5 & VC 2.5?

Hi

At the VMUG event I learned about a few new features that are available in ESX 3.5 & VC 2.5. Jeremy van Doorn told us about:

  • Distributed Power Management (Still experimental)
  • NPIV support (connect a HBA to a VM instead of an ESX host)
  • VMware update manager (formerly Shavlik)
  • Storage VMotion (VMotion the storage of a VM to a different location, only through command line)
  • Paravirtualization possible on a per VM basis
  • More RAM for a VM, up to 64GB and more RAM for the host, max 128GB
  • SATA drives support (not known which drives are supported)
  • Hardware page tabels for even less overhead when virtualizing memory
  • 32 nodes instead of 16 in a DRS / HA cluster
  • Up to 10 isolation addresses in HA
  • A VM can now have a local swap file
  • Cisco Discovery Protocol
  • Wake On LAN for your nics
  • And a very important VCB feature: restore files on VM

Apart from these items, I discovered some more nice little improvements in the interface. So the next post will be only screenshots and short comments on each new feature or button I discovered :-)