The VMware team few days back has a very short Webinar on “What’s New in VMware Infrastructure 3.5”. I have missed some of the points, but below are the most important things that have been raised:

ESX Server 3.5 & 3i:
The 3i server will be next generation to the “normal” ESX a decisive strategic plan. End of the year, the first hardware manufacturer will start releasing servers with the 3i server pre-installed. The list price of 3i is $ 495 for 2 CPUs. In the long run, the ESX3i seems to be the replacement for ESX3 stripping the Service Console!

Distributed Power Management:
This feature is an enhancement for the existing DRS. It will power down unoccupiedphysical hosts (to spare electricity) and, power it on if necessary, again!

improved HA:
HA is now no longer limited to hardware failure of a physical hosts respond, but also hanging VMs restart. This will be implemented using the vmware-tools and the associated Heard beat. Thus, each supported VM OS is supported – it is allowed to be curious whether the thing in practice really works!

Storage VMotion:
So far VMotion was only between machines sharing the same storage. If you had to move a VM between different storages you had to turn off the VM then clone it (Basically required down time). Storage motion will allow you to migrate your VM from one storage to another while the machine is running (no down time required). It will be possible as well to use Storage Motion between different topologies (FC, iSCSI, local storage) to slide. Storage Motion has not yet been integrated in the GUI of the VI Client or the Virtual Center GUI. You will have to use it through command line.

VirtualCenter 2.5:
VC 2.5 has already integrated the converter. In addition, there will be an integrated Guided Consolidation “. Here, the performance of physical hosts analyzed and presenta proposal of how thesePhysical machines can be distributed as VMs on the ESX Servers. VMware Guided Consolidation is a good addition but only for “small” environments and is not a substitute for the capacity planner.

Virtual Desktop Manager:
With the VDM the SLI should be supported. Microsoft Active Directory integration is supported. After registration, the user can be either a 1:1 allocation on a VM or a StandardVM loaded, or rotating virtual machines on the users as set by administrators.

Update Manager:
The Update Manager supports both the ESX as well as the VMs. As Windows and Redhat VMs are supported. You can create baseline of which the OS patches on the VMs must be recorded. Allegedly, the update manager before the playing of the patches take a snapshot of the VM which can be used to roll back in case of a problem or failure.
The ESX can be automatically updated, ie: it moves all VMs before it continues in the Maintenance mode fashion, plays the update, and rebooted.

Recovery Site Manager:
This feature is not at the time of the 3.5 release. It will continue only as a separate product to buy.
The aim is to define multiple sites, which can be used to implement disaster recovery scenarios for your Virtual environment. When switching between data center for example between A to B dependencies (boot sequence) between the VMs can be defined as well. Note: The Recovery Site Manager depend on the underlying storage replication and your storage must be supported for it to work.

More physical/virtual memory:
VM can take up to 64GB of RAM & host up to 128GB…

Migration:
The 3.5 version file system is also VMFS3. So you can assume that the upgrade scenario is really simple crocheted. LVM was called to support it (for 2 years):!