Things to get excited about this winter!

I’m actually really looking forward to the winter this year, and it seems that 5 is the lucky number. The new iPhone 5 will be released, rumours suggest this will be on or around 15th October, and then there is the iPad 3 (ok, it’s not 5 but worth mentioning!) which should have a far superior retina display which will be great for reading PDF’s and studying with! I’m still using the iPhone 3GS and iPad 1 so my Xmas list is easy this year, whether I get what I want depends on how good I am!

In the virtual world, at least inside the cloud, VMware have released vSphere 5 and View 5, in addition to many other new products. With the up and coming release of Microsoft Windows 8 with it’s incredible boot time thanks to the way it shuts down in a hybrid shutdown / sleep state, I can only imagine the benefits this will bring to desktop virtualisation and end-user computing as a whole.

So what’s the deal with vSphere 5?  Well, it’s a big deal indeed. VMware are no longer offering ESX with it’s service console, so you’ll have to use ESXi. The difference? Well, ESXi doesn’t have a service console (as such) as like ESXi 4 it has a DCUI (Direct Console User Interface) which is very limited but there if needed. Management of ESXi should be performed using the vMA (vSphere Management Assistant) which by the way is excellent and you’ll begin to wonder why on earth you needed ESX’s service console in the first place  Needless to say you can automate many tasks with PowerCLI. Here are some of the new features of vSphere 5:

• VMFS 5 (now with unified 1MB block size and volume size of 60TB supported!)
• Storage DRS
• ESXi firewall
• vSphere 5 Web Client (you’ve gotta see this, it’s great!)
• Virtual hardware version 8
• vSphere Storage Appliance (vSA)
• … the list goes on!

The VCP510 exam (vSphere 5) is now available and if you take this before 29th February 2012 you won’t need to take any course prerequisite which is good to hear. After that date though you must take the pre-qualifying course. My colleague Simon Long at VMware has put together a VCP5 practice exam (good work dude!) so definately check this out.

So what’s next?   Well for me at least, I’ve got plenty of work to do. I need to site my VCAP-DCD exam, but I’m mega busy working on Vblock deployments with VCE at the moment. It’s good though as I get to travel the world and I’m off to Australia soon. The downside is studying for any exam is something I have to do in my sleep. I think 2012 will be a jam packed year for sure, with even more amazing products from VMware and even more certifications to achieve!

Thanks for reading! Feel free comment below