What I’ve Seen and Like About ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5

I recently upgraded my production environment to ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5. While on the surface things appear to be pretty much as they were, there are some differences that I especially like.

The first is the NPIV implementation. For those of you less than tech savvy that means N-Port ID Virtualization. In a nutshell, this allows the assigning of a virtual WWN (World Wide Name) to a virtual server which then allows a connection to a SAN through this WWN. NPIV essentially allows the virtualization of the fiber cards in the VMware Host server. While this may not sound that extraordinary, in our environment this is a real blessing, as now we only need one set of scripts for fiber as opposed to two sets for both fiber in our production environment and iSCSI in our TEST and DEV environments.

The next thing, while small, is still nice is the ability to resize .vmdk virtual disks from the Virtual Center Client. For me this takes the hassle out of having to log into the console and perform this upgrade. Anything that reduces my hassle I’m all for.

I also really like the Storage Vmotion Capability. This tool has already allowed me to consolidate wasted space on our SAN and upgrade two VMFS partitions to support larger files (yes, I actually have two VM’s that need over 500GB in storage!). This is well worth its weight in gold to me.

One other thing I’ve noticed is in Virtual Center 2.5. It seems to be a bit “peppier” and responds better for me. Mind you, I’m a bit annoyed that they didn’t provide me with a 64 Bit client. However, as a work around I installed the new Virtual Center client on our admin tools Citrix server and I now run the 2.5 client from there. So, it’s not really a big deal, just more of an annoyance. I’m sure when VMware looked at how many people actually use a 64 bit workstation for management purposes it wasn’t worth the time or the money in the initial release to provide this. From a purely business perspective I understand this. From a tech perspective I feel that they could have been more sensitive to the needs of we poor IT Techs.

I’m sure there are other features that I’m going to find in the new version and go “That is cool!” about. However, these are the features that provided an immediate impact for me. I wonder what others are thinking are cool features of the new ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5? Any comments on this?