Beth Pariseau from Techtarget and Kenneth van Surksum from Virtualization.info is reporting some of the possible upcoming VMware vSphere 5 details. Here are some of the speculated details:
- Build on the vSphere ESXi hypervisor architecture
- vSphere Auto Deploy combining host profiles, Image Builder and PXE
- Unified CLI framework, allowing consistency of authentication, roles and auditing.
- Support for up to 1 TB of memory
- Support for 32 vCPU’s per VM
- Nonhardware accelerated 3D graphics for Windows Aero support
- USB 3.0 device support
- UEFI virtual BIOS
- Host EUFI boot support
- New GUI to configure multicore vCPUs
- Client-connected USB devices
- Smart card reader support for VMs
- Apple Mac OS X Server 10.6 (Snow Leopard) guest OS support
- Support for up to 512 VMs
- Support for up to 160 Logical CPUs and 2 TB or RAM
- Improved SNMP support
- Storage driven storage delivery based on the VMware-Aware Storage APIs
- Improved version of the Cluster File System, VMFS5
- Accelerator for specific use with View (VDI) workloads, providing a read cache optimized for recognizing, handling and deduplicating VDI client images.
- iSCSI user interface support
- Storage APIs – Array Integration: Thin Provisioning enabling reclaiming blocks of a thin provisioned LUN on the array when a virtual disk is deleted
- Swap to SSD
- 2TB+ LUN support
- Storage vMotion snapshot support
- vNetwork Distributed Switch improvements providing improved visibility in VM traffic
- ESXi Firewall protecting the ESXi 5.0 management interface
- A browser-based, fully-extensible, platform-independent implementation of the vSphere Client based on Adobe Flex.
- vCenter Server Appliance
- Inventory Extensibility: providing a manager to monitor partner extensions.
- vCenter Solutions Manager, providing a consistent interface to configure and monitor vCenter-integrated solutions developed by VMware and third parties.
- System message logging enhancements
- Revamped VMware High Availability (HA) with Fault Domain Manager
- All hosts in cluster can be primary nodes
- Cluster also uses shared storage as a channel for heartbeat detection