With all the enhancements and new features were announced with vSphere 5, many of you waiting patiently for vSphere 5 to be available for download. The good news that the long waited vSphere 5 has been announced available for download yesterday. You can download the vSphere 5 installers at: http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere/5_0

vSphere 5 has a tons of enhancements & new features, below just a summary of the major new features:

• Convergence. vSphere 5.0 is the first vSphere release built exclusively on the vSphere ESXi 5.0 hypervisor architecture as the host platform.
• VMware vSphere Auto Deploy. VMware vSphere Auto Deploy simplifies the task of managing ESXi installation and upgrade for hundreds of machines. It makes stateless ESXi possible.
• New Virtual machine capabilities. 32-way virtual SMP, 1TB virtual machine RAM, Software support for 3D graphics, and more. Did anyone say I need a larger VM? Dare you to say that now!!!
• Expanded support for VMware Tools versions. VMware Tools from vSphere 4.x is supported in virtual machines running on vSphere 5.0 hosts.
• Storage DRS. This feature delivers the DRS benefits of resource aggregation, automated initial placement, and bottleneck avoidance to storage. For those of you used to DRS and how it load balance VMs across hosts, Storage DRS do the same but for storage. It distribute VMs across Datastores to make sure the VMs are balanced across Datastore capacity & IOs wise.
• Profile-Driven storage. This solution allows you to have greater control and insight into characteristics of your storage resources.
• VMFS5. VMFS5 is a new version of vSphere Virtual Machine File System that offers improved scalability and performance, and provides Internationalization support.
• Storage vMotion snapshot support. Allows Storage vMotion of a virtual machine in snapshot mode with associated snapshots.
• vSphere Web Client. A new browser-based user interface that works across Linux and Windows platforms.
• vCenter Server Appliance. A vCenter Server implementation running on a pre-configured Linux-based virtual appliance.
• vSphere High Availability. VMware High Availability has been transformed into a cloud-optimized availability platform.

Soon I will be posting separate posts to cover some of these new features and will link it from the above features summary to shed more details on them. Any way go ahead and start your downloads now and enjoy the all new vSphere 5 features & leave your feedback.