I’m not going to bore you with all the mundane details about what is new, so many other folks are doing that, but here is a post from VMware which has links to pdfs as to what is new.
It looks pretty decent, the licensing change is welcome, though not everyone agrees with that. I find it interesting that the web console is going to be the main GUI to manage vSphere going forward. I found the web console in 5.0 severely lacking, but I’m sure it’s improved in 5.1. Anyone happen to know if the new console is backwards compatible with vCenter 5.0 ? Also I wonder if this web console applies to managing ESXi hosts directly (without vCenter)? I assume it doesn’t apply(yet) ?
I don’t see myself upgrading anytime before the end of the year, but it does seem strongly to me that this 5.1 release is what 5.0 should of been last year.
I find this race to a million iops quite silly, whether it is VMware’s latest claim of 1 million iops in a VM, or EMC’s latest claim, or HDS’s latest claim, everyone is trying to show they can do a million too, and the fine print always seems to point to a 100% read workload, maybe customers will buy their arrays with their data pre-loaded, so they don’t have to do any writes to them.