Preliminary Review on vSphere 5.0

I've started my research on our upgrade to vSphere v5.0. Right now we are running v4.1. My company is running about 200 VMs in 4 different physical locations. We have 15 ESX Hosts.

The plan has been for me to upgrade to v5.0 in the first quarter. Unfortunately after reviewing all the various upgrade guides, reading the documentation, and now about a quarter of the way through Master vSphere 5, I haven't been very impressed with the upgrade feature set.

Usually when I do a major upgrade I like to see at least one feature that really "WOWS" me. Something that makes it a real compelling reason to upgrade. I don't like to upgrade just for the sake of upgrading or to simply have something to do. For example, we are in the midsts of upgrading from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010. The feature worthwhile to upgrade was the improved web client. It really is a great client and is fairly uniform across all the major browsers. This was something the staff wanted for a long time. The upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7 (Vista never happened) gave us Aero Glass and a much improved security model. Both features well worth the upgrade.

So what does v5 have? Well, you have to remember that we have an Enterprise license with VMware, so we get "only" the feature set included with Enterprise. If you aren't familar with VMware licensing you may be surprised to know that there is a license tier above Enterprise called Enterprise Plus. Many of the new features of v5 are only available in Enterprise Plus, which I feel is an extremely costly upgrade. It is not some nominal increase in cost from Enterprise to Enterprise Plus. So to be clear what is new in v5 Enterprise? Specifically what are the really important new features, The "WOW" features, in v5 Enterprise?

1. Larger VMs -- More RAM and More CPUs per VM -- Maximum number of vCPUs increases to 8 (Remember: This is the Enterprise license). This is probably our most important must have feature. Having virtualized 90% of our servers, we definitely have a few big boxes that could use 8x CPUs.
2. Bigger VMFS volumes -- This would have been nice in VMware v4.1, but now that we have converted everything to NFS storage for the VMDK files, this improvement really doesn't matter. NFS volumes are unlimited in size.
3. Storage Appliance and vCenter Appliance -- Although we don't need either, I see where a lot of SMBs could really use either solution.
4. Replication in SRM - Site Recovery Manager now includes data replication. SRM v5 requires vSphere v5 to get the replication peice. I have yet to find a truly great replication solution for DR for our sized company. SRM v5 gives me hope.
5. New License Model -- Not only do you need to pay licensing per socket, but you now need to pay based on how much vRAM is provisioned. This is a "WOW" that sucks feature. It's a wonderful example of a company just trying to vacuum up as much money as possible from clients. For years, I've been virtually handing ram out for free for new VMs. With the shared memory model and compression, the RAM I would provision was fairly cheap. Now I am faced with the herculean option of asking users for the RAM back or paying the new vRAM tax.

All the other major features...fairly useless to us

1. Auto-Deploy for ESX -- For 15 ESX Hosts, it will faster to deploy by hand
2. 3D Graphics for Windows Aero -- Meant for VDI deployments. VMware needs to solve the HD playback problem first.
3. Profile-Driven Storage, SIOC, NIOC, & Distributed Switch -- All look great but....I'm not a member of the elite Enterprise Plus club
4. New High Availability, New Web Client - meh ... The HA was never a major problem if you read the manual. When would I use the feature poor web client instead of vCenter Client?
5. ESXi only -- I love watching a company try to market removing a feature\option as a positive. Apple does it all the time to great success. VMware not as well. v5 can only be installed using ESXi. All my ESX hosts will need to be converted. No over the top install possible.

I'm probably going to push the upgrade to Q2-Q3. I'll probably wait for the first service pack and do something else instead.