Manual

VMware vSphere 5.1
The newest release of vSphere represents a high-performance VM chassis capable of harnessing the power
of a new CPU engine and drives requirements for an expanded I/O interface. The new I/O capabilies of
QLogic server adapters combined with vSphere 5.1 complement enhancements related to Storage vMoon.
 Storage vMoon—vSphere 5.1 enables users to combine vMoon and Storage vMoon into one operaon. The
combined migraon copies both the VM memory and its disk over the network to the desnaon host. In larger
environments, this bandwidth-intensive operaon enables
VMs and datastores to be migrated between clusters that do
not have a common set of datastores.
 Parallel Disk Copies—vSphere 5.1 allows up to four parallel
disk copies per Storage vMoon operaon, where previous
versions of vSphere used to copy disks serially. When you
migrate a VM with ve VMDK les, Storage vMoon copies
the rst four in parallel, then starts the next disk copy as
soon as one of the rst four nishes.
 Gen 5 Fibre Channel—To help complete the storage
vMoon as soon as possible, vSphere 5.1 includes support
for Gen 5 Fibre Channel. In vSphere 5.0, VMware introduced
support for Gen 5 Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters, but
they had to be throled down to work at 8Gb. Now,
vSphere 5.1 supports these Host Bus Adapters running
at Gen 5.
 10GbE and SR-IOV—For applicaons which require low-latency performance, SR-IOV-capable 10GbE server
adapters oer the benets of direct I/O, which reduce latency and host CPU ulizaon.
From a storage planning perspecve, when comparing vSphere 5.1 to previous versions, there are two
specicaons which stand out: the amount of memory/VM (1TB) and the amount of acve VMs per machine
(1,024).
With today’s storage usage, a petabyte of storage could be needed to support 1,024 VMs. While this
scenario is unlikely for at least a few years, running 100 VMs with 512GB of virtual memory each on a single
server (which would require 52TB of storage for the memory content alone) is very foreseeable.
A New Virtualizaon Chassis
In vSphere 5.1, support for Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters
helps ensure adequate I/O to maximize VM densies and
quickly complete vMoon and Storage vMoon migraons.
Gen 5
Fibre Channel
Execung Storage vMoons is now easier than ever, increasing
the need for high-performance 10GbE or Gen 5 Fibre Channel
storage networks.
vMoon and Storage vMoon