vSphere 5.1 has been released several months ago, and among its new features and capabilities, I think the important ones are the following:

1. Larger virtual machines. Virtual machines can now have up to 64 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and 1TB of virtual RAM (vRAM). This means that enterprise apps such as SAP, large databases, email, and other high demand apps can now be virtualized without worrying about CPU and memory resources. The goal of attaining 100% virtualization in the Data Centers can now be realized.

2. vSphere Data Protection and vSphere Replication. vSphere Data Protection is used to backup and recover virtual machines. vSphere Replication is used to replicate virtual machines to remote Data Center for disaster recovery. No need to integrate third party tools such as Veeam for backup or Zerto for replication to remote DR site.

3. vSphere 5.1 eliminates the need to reboot virtual machines for subsequent VMware Tools upgrades on Windows.

For a complete list of the new features and capabilities, go to this website:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsphere/vmware-what-is-new-vsphere51.pdf

However, the vSphere Web Client is now the core administrative interface for vSphere. The vSphere client is still available but I’m afraid it will not be supported in future releases. I still like the vSphere client because it’s more roubust, stable, and faster. In addition, there are a lot of plug-ins that are still not available in the Web Client such as the NetApp Virtual Storage Console for VMware vSphere. We use NetApp for our datastore and this plug-in is very important to us.