vSphere 5 - 7

VMware vSphere 5.0 is a significant milestone for VMware, introducing many new features and capabilities. For many, the road to vSphere 5.0 will begin by upgrading existing vSphere environments. Fortunately, included with the many new features and capabilities of vSphere 5.0 is a simple upgrade path that makes it easy to migrate from VMware vCenter 4.x to vCenter 5.0 and from VMware ESXi 4.x to ESXi 5.0. And for the first time, users have the ability to do an in-place migration from VMware ESX® 4.x to ESXi 5.0. This paper provides an overview of the ESXi 5.0 upgrade process, along with recommendations to help ensure a smooth and seamless transition.

VMware vSphere 5.0 Upgrade Best Practices

This paper describes the architecture of ESXi and then explains how various management tasks are performed in it. This information can be used to help plan a migration to the ESXi architecture from the legacy ESX framework and to improve or enhance day-to-day operations.

VMware ESXi 5.0 Operations Guide

VMware's Site Recovery Manager 5 leverages the all inclusive auto replication of the Dell EqualLogic PS Series SAN to create an automated disaster recovery tool. Learn how SRM enables the administrator to develop an entire new DR strategy based on virtualized infrastructure. This first part covers SRM and how to configure replication on the PS Series SAN.

vSphere supports several command‐line interfaces for managing your virtual infrastructure including the vSphere Command‐Line Interface (vCLI), a set of ESXi Shell commands, and PowerCLI. You can choose the CLI set best suited for your needs, and write scripts to automate your CLI tasks.

The vCLI command set includes vicfg- commands and ESXCLI commands. The ESXCLI commands included in the vCLI package are equivalent to the ESXCLI commands available on the ESXi Shell. The vicfgcommand set is similar to the deprecated esxcfg- command set in the ESXi Shell.

You can manage many aspects of an ESXi host with the ESXCLI command set. You can run ESXCLI commands as vCLI commands or run them in the ESXi Shell in troubleshooting situations. You can also run ESXCLI commands from the PowerCLI shell by using the Get-EsxCli cmdlet. See the vSphere PowerCLI Administration Guide and the vSphere PowerCLI Reference. The set of ESXCLI commands available on a host depends on the host configuration. The vSphere Command‐Line Interface Reference lists help information for all ESXCLI commands. Run esxcli --server <MyESXi> --help before you run a command on a host to verify that the command is defined on the host you are targeting.

You can use this link to get your copy of the VMware ESXi 5.0 Reference Poster.

vSphere 5 introduces a new latency-aware Metro vMotion feature that not only provides better performance over long latency networks but also increases the round-trip latency limit for vMotion networks from 5 milliseconds to 10 milliseconds. Previously, vMotion was supported only on networks with round-trip latencies of up to 5 milliseconds. In vSphere 4.1, vMotion is supported only when the latency between the source and destination ESXi/ESX hosts is less than 5 ms RTT (round-trip time). For higher latencies, not all workloads are guaranteed to converge. With Metro vMotion in vSphere 5.0, vMotion can be used to move a running virtual machine when the source and destination ESX hosts have a latency of more than 5ms RTT. The maximum supported round trip time latency between the two hosts is now 10ms. Metro vMotion is only available with vSphere Enterprise Plus license.

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Fellow vExpert Forbes Guthrie has released his vSphere 5.0 documentation notes.

Here are my condensed notes for the vSphere 5.0 documentation. They’re excerpts taken directly from VMware’s own official PDFs.  The notes aren’t meant to be comprehensive, or for a beginner; just my own personal notes.  I made them whilst studying for the VCP5 beta exam, and its part of the process I use to collate information for the vSphere Reference Card.

http://www.vreference.com/vsphere-5-notes/