It's been about a month since the official release of vSphere 5.1. And, as the dust settles, we've heard quite a bit from the virtualization community and punditry - mostly positive.

As you know, we're in the trenches everyday with customers designing and implementing virtualization solutions (and answering lots of questions!). Therefore, we thought it would be helpful to add to the exiting opinion and analysis with our view. Especially given the fact that this release is much more than simple bug fixes and updates.

So, over the next several weeks, I'll be writing a “What’s New in vSphere 5.1 &amp; Why You Want It”? series, right here, on the eGroup blog. Be sure to come back often - in the meantime, if you have any questions on vSphere 5.1, share in the comments.

Here are some vSphere 5.1 features to look forward to:
<ul>
	<li><strong>vMotion:</strong> I know, I know, "But vMotion launched in 2003!" And you're right, it did. But this is the second coming of vMotion - and it's as cool as the first one was. vMotion has lost its shared storage requirement. You no longer have to present the same storage over NFS, iSCSI, FC, or FCoE to all the hosts in a cluster in order to enable vMotion. If you're planning for a simultaneous compute and storage upgrade, you no longer need to deploy your new hardware in stages - just configure your new hosts and storage together and bring your VMs across on your existing vMotion network.</li>
	<li><strong>vSphere Distributed Switch:</strong> The fastest and easiest way to manage your virtual networking got several improvements in vSphere 5.1. You can now monitor the health of your vSphere Distributed Switch in three main areas: VLANs, MTU, and Teaming and Failover. If your physical uplink ports don't have identical VLANs trunked, if your MTU is mismatched between your vDS and your physical switches, or if your physical link aggregation doesn't match your virtual configuration, the vSphere 5.1 vDS can now alert you of these problems. You can now also backup and restore a vDS config or even backup and restore to a duplicate vDS to clone an existing configuration. Most importantly, if any change to the vDS configuration ever isolates a host from vCenter, that host will automatically rollback to the previous configuration when it detects the isolation. The vDS management ports can also be managed directly from the ESXi DCUI (the physical host console).</li>
	<li><strong>Little Things Matter!:</strong> VMware Tools upgrades no longer require VM reboots! The vSphere 5.1 VMware Tools upgrade will be the last time you have to reboot your VMs just to upgrade the Tools. Uptime, here we come!</li>
</ul>
Check back for part two coming soon!