Now deploying vSphere 5. Although there was an uproar amongst the community about the new memory licensing model, in practice most installations would not be affected, as VMware have allowed sufficient memory in each licensing bundle.

But there are lot's of new features that will be of benefit. In the SME sector, they now have a new tab in the iSCSI software adapter to allow the addition of separate VMKernels to load balance iSCSI traffic across NIC's. We previously had to do this via the command line. Now it's point & click. And I tested it by failing a switch & controller, and there was absolutely no disruption to storage traffic, just an alert to warn the admin of the failed connection.

Also the change to VMFS5 is most welcome. The universal 1MB block size with sub-blocks will make storage administration easier, and will improve Host level replication too.

And it comes as ESXi only. I haven't bothered deploying the full fat ESX in a while, as I knew the ESXi only model was coming, so I decided to go with the flow early. Plus ESXi lowers costs, as now we no longer need disks in the Hosts if we are using shared storage.

There's lot's more in there too but I just haven't had time to play with it.