The Business Case for ESXi5
Posted by Harry Bouhoutsos on 24 November 2011 | 0 Comments
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When ESX 5 was released in July this year, VMware displayed once again why their product is highly regarded and used in organisation large and small though out the world. A number of improvements on the existing platform and a range on new features makes ESX 5 even more attractive than previous versions.
Some attractive features include:
- New virtual hardware – ESXi 5.0 introduces and new generation of virtual hardware which allows the running of more CPU intensive workloads on the VMware platform, utilising up to 32 virtual CPUs and 1TB of RAM. If you thought that some of your physical servers could not be virtualised, think again
- The ability to hot add VM vCPUs and memory, to grow VMFS volumes, to hot extend virtual disks and to hot add virtual disks means less downtime for your production environments.
- New ESXi Firewall – the ESXi 5.0 is protected by a service-oriented and stateless firewall. The new firewall which also protects the VMs is now easier to configure and maintain, so security can now be easily managed in the VMware environment.
- VMs can be migrated from one host to another even though they have snapshots. If one host fails the VMs will still fail over to another host.
- vCenter is now available as a preconfigured Server Appliance, so you can manage your ESX farm from a dedicated device rather than a Windows server. Your VM management platform will no longer require Microsoft patches or antivirus updates
- The new virtual hardware also allows you to utilise Windows 7 features by using Windows Aero desktops and running 3D applications in virtual machines. These nice to have features of a physical desktop and be enjoyed in a virtual desktop too.
- vSphere Autodeploy - A new set of command line utilities allows administrators to create custom ESXi images that images that include specialised hardware. This allows for an even faster deployment of new hosts enhancing the ability to quickly grow your ESX farm
There were many other value add features offered in ESXi4 and 4.1, so if you are still using ESXi3.5 you may wish to ask one of our consultants what additional benefits are available by upgrading your virtual environment.