The goals of the VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) 5.1 version release are twofold: The first is to enhance the current offering to fully address small to mid sized business use cases; the second is to support adjacent markets such as remote office/branch office (ROBO).
The primary enhancements in VSA 5.1 are as follows:
- VSA 5.1 has the ability to have more than eight disk drives per VMware ESXi host.
- VSA 5.1 has the ability to select how much local disk space to allocate to the VSA as shared storage, as well as the ability to dynamically increase the storage used by the VSA.
- A single VMware vCenter Server instance now can manage multiple VSA instances.
- The vCenter Server instance managing VSA now can route to the ESXi hosts participating in the VSA storage cluster. There no longer is a requirement to have the vCenter Server instance and ESXi hosts on the same subnet.
- VSA 5.1 enables deployment on ESXi hosts that already have been configured and have running virtual machines.
The remainder of this What’s New in VMware vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1 white paper will discuss each of these enhancements in greater detail. It will also review additional, minor enhancements to the product.
Technical White Paper - What’s New in VMware vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1.pdf
