vSphere Storage Appliance – VSA

vSphere 5 vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA), a solution designed for small businesses that do not have the budget to purchase a storage array and want to have high availability in terms of storage or have features such as HA or VMotion, DRS… Thanks to this small appliance that runs on each host and through the VSA Manager, we will have the local datastores replicated between the ESXi hosts.

VMware vSphere Authentication Proxy

Already in a previous document of the version 4.1 we saw as a novelty that we could include our ESXi hosts in an Active Directory to authenticate directly with centralized accounts; one of the new features of vSphere 5 is the possibility of deploying an intermediate proxy between the hosts and our domain. All this to help in the deployment with Auto Deploy not to put users with passwords in configuration files, we will also be able to use it with hosts not deployed with Auto Deploy!

Using VM Storage Profiles – Profile-Driven Storage

One of VMware's new storage features in vSphere 5 en Profile-Driven Storage, By configuring a series of profiles and labels we can define the characteristics of our datastores. We will be able to define our warehouses according to their performance, availability, value… to later store the virtual machines in them depending on the quality of service that we want/must offer. When creating a VC, migrating it from datastore or cloning it, vCenter will show us the compatible datastores where we will store the VM, thus avoiding any human error,

Using Datastore Cluster on VMware vSphere 5

It is one of the new features of vSphere 5, It is a pool of datastores that will help us to manage the datastores together, always obtaining the best result to locate a virtual machine and thus have a higher performance at the disk level since it will always offer us recommendations to choose the lightest datastore. It will also analyze and generate recommendations for moving virtual machines between the different datastores in the cluster.