I am getting lot of request from email to post the difference between the vSphere 4.0 and vSphere 5.0. Here the post for the requests and I believe this could be the definite questions in interviews and this post helps you to just quickly review the difference between the features of this 2 vSphere Releases.
If you are looking for Difference between ESX 3.5 and ESX 4.0. Please refer my Blogpost “Difference between ESX 3.5 and ESX 4.0”
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Features | vSphere 4.1 | vSphere 5.0 |
Hypervisor | ESX & ESXi | Only ESXi |
VMA | Yes VMA 4.1 | Yes VMA 5 |
HA Agent | AAM Automatic Availability Manager | FDM Fault Domain Manager |
HA Host Approach | Primary & Secondary | Master & Slave |
HA Failure Detection | Management N/W | Management N/W and Storage communication |
HA Log File | /etc/opt/vmware/AAM | /etc/opt/vmware/FDM |
DNS Dependent on DNS | Yes | NO |
Host UEFI boot support | NO | boot systems from hard drives, CD/DVD drives, or USB media |
Storage DRS | Not Available | Yes |
VM Affinity & Anti-Affinity | Available | Available |
VMDK Affinity & Anti-Affinity | Not Available | Available |
Profile driven storage | Not Available | Available |
VMFS version | VMFS-3 | VMFS-5 |
VSphere Storage Appliance | Not Available | Available |
Iscsi Port Binding | Can be only done via Cli using ESXCLI | Configure dependent hardware iSCSI and software iSCSI adapters along with the network configurations and port binding in a single dialog box using the vSphere Client. |
Storage I/O control for NFS | Fiber Channel | Fiber Channel & NFS |
Storage Vmotion Snapshot support | VM with Snapshot cannot be migrated using Storage vMotion | VM with Snapshot can be migrated using Storage vMotion |
Swap to SSD | NO | Yes |
Network I/O control | Yes | Yes with enhancement |
ESXi firewall | Not Available | Yes |
vCenter Linux Support | Not Available | vCenter Virtual Appliance |
vSphere Full Client | Yes | Yes |
vSphere Web Client | Yes | yes with lot of improvements |
VM Hardware Version | 7 | 8 |
Virtual CPU per VM | 8 vCpu | 32 vCpu |
Virtual Machine RAM | 255 GB | 1 TB of vRAM |
VM Swapfile size | 255 GB | 1 TB |
Support for Client connected USB | Not Available | Yes |
Non Hardware Accelerated 3D grpahics support | Not Available | Yes |
UEFI Virtual BIOS | Not Available | Yes |
VMware Tools Version | 4.1 | 5 |
Mutlicore vCpu | Not Available | Yes configure at VM setting |
MAC OS Guest Support | Not Available | Apple Mac OS X Server 10.6 |
Smart card reader support for VM | Not Available | Yes |
Auto Deploy | Not Available | Yes |
Image Builder | Not Available | Yes |
VM’s per host | 320 | 512 |
Max Logical Cpu per Host | 160 | 160 |
RAM per Host | 1 TB | 2 TB |
MAX RAM for Service Console | 800 MB | Not Applicable (NO SC) |
LUNS per Server | 256 | 256 |
Metro Vmotion | Round-trip latencies of up to 5 milliseconds. | Round-trip latencies of up to 10 milliseconds. This provides better performance over long latency networks |
Storage Vmotion | Moving VM Files using moving to using dirty block tracking | Moving VM Files using I/O mirroring with better enhancements |
Virtual Distributed Switch | Yes | Yes with more enhancements like deeper view into virtual machine traffic through Netflow and enhances monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities through SPAN and LLDP |
USB 3.0 Support | NO | Yes |
Host Per vCenter | 1000 | 1000 |
Powered on virtual machines per vCenter Server | 10000 | 10000 |
Vmkernel | 64-bit | 64-bit |
Service Console | 64-bit | Not Applicable (NO SC) |
Licensing | vSphere Essentials vSphere Essentials Plus vSphere Standard vSphere Advanced vSphere Enterprise vSphere Enterprise Plus | vSphere Essentials vSphere Essentials Plus vSphere Standard vSphere Enterprise vSphere Enterprise Plus |