just learned about these vsphere features today from the vsphere overview slide...

• supports DVFS (dynamic voltage frequency slection) and DPM (dynamic power management) via IPMI
• virtual sas & ide interfaces now supported
• enable hot add for memory / cpu (has to be enabled while machine is powered off)
• storage stack performance and scalability - the combination of the new in-guest virtualization-optimized SCSI driver, and the additional - ESX kernel-level storage stack optimizations dramatically improves storage I/O perfomance - I/O intensive applications like DB and exchange servers will now be even more primed for virtualization.
• iSCSI  stack improvements have been made as well for both software and hardware.  CPU overhead reductions have been significant.
• Volume Grow + Hot VMDK Extend - vDS - vNetwork Distributed Switch - Private VLANS (PVLANs), virtual distributed uplinks, network vmotion (counters, and port statistics follow VM), bi-directional traffic shaping. Obviously support for 3rd party switch a la nexus 1000V -   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_VLAN
• VMXNET Generation 3 - MSI/MSI-X support, Receive Side Scaling (Windows 2008), VLAN off-loading
• from MS doc on RSS: “Today’s systems have an increasing number of CPUs. The ability of the networking protocol stack of the Windows® operating system to scale well on a multi-CPU system is restricted. This restriction is caused by the architecture of the Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) in Windows Server® 2003 and earlier versions, which limits receive protocol processing to a single CPU at any one time. Receive-side scaling (RSS) resolves this issue by allowing the network load from a network adapter to be distributed across multiple CPUs.”   http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/network/ndis_rss.mspx
• fault tolerance
• enhanced storage vmotion now with minimized resource consumption + converstion of disk from thick to thin during session.
• vcenter servers can be inter-connected in loinked mode so you can share roles and licenses across multiple connect vcenter servers
• view multiple vcenter inventories can be seen from one vcenter client.
• host profiles can be maintained, deployed (as a golden configuration), and audited
• vApps - encapsulate multiple application VMs into a single virtual service entity.  Then you can do single power operations, clone, deploy and monitor the whole application.  You can export this profile as an OVF file.
• the new performance charts are totally awesome.  they are like task manager opened across all VMs in front of you.
• automate guest operating system customization improvements - server 2008 and ubuntu 8.04 
• for disaster recovery of a vmfs volume - a replicated volume not in the same datacenter can be mounted without writing a new signature.
• you can record and replay virtual machine execution. - vmkernel exploit protection
• many integrity checks and hardware-based protection option available.

Posted via web from Andy Slezak's Posterous