1. FT (Fault Tolerance) Continuously protects Virtual Machines (VM) through non-disruptive host failover if an ESX server goes down unexpectedly. Their new "lockstep" technology maintains an identical VM copy on a secondary ESX host ready to take over in an instant via an HA Cluster. Third-party cluster software is no longer required, taking VMware's HA (High Availability) feature to the next level of reliability. 2. Data Recovery This easy-to-configure VM backup and recovery scheme copies VM data to a "disk device" (vs tape) allowing rapid recovery from VM corruption or loss. The GUI wizard configuration does not require integration with third-party backup software or tape libraries, as does VCB (VMware Consolidated Backup) offered in VMware 3.x, currently unaltered in its support of traditional ESX/VM backup to tape. 3. Thin Provisioning Put your VM's virtual disks on a capacity diet, to eliminate issues connected with over- and under-allocation of Datastore disk space. VMs "see" the total configured disk capacity, but are "allocated" only the amount of data actually written to disk. Disk usage allotments are granular, allocated in 1 MB chunks. Metadata consumes some space. 4. Dynamic Virtual Disk Growth (Hot Expand) If a VM requires more space than what has been initially configured, the underlying virtual disk capacity can grow without the use of "extents" (spanned disks). 5. Software iSCSI Initiator tuning The VMkernel stack on an ESX host more efficiently processes the software iSCSI protocol, now streamlined and no longer requiring a Service Console connection. In addition to reducing CPU overhead, disk I/O are passed more efficiently to an iSCSI SAN. Traditionally, without Fibre Channel or iSCSI hardware adapters, use of ESX's native iSCSI software driver affected performance related to "bloated" TCP/IP overhead. 6. Paravirtualized SCSI VM guest OS performance (i.e. throughput) is now improved by configuring the PV SCSI driver on non-system data virtual disks. The result of streamlining I/O batching and interrupts is support for more I/O intensive applications running in VMs. 7. Storage VMotion Not completely new, but improved GUI-based Storage VMotion will non-disruptively migrate a running VM's disk storage to or from any FC, iSCSI or NFS disk datastore (within the same vCenter datacenter) as well as between traditional "Thick" and new "Thin" LUNs.
