vSphere 5.1 Announcement Annoyances

If you’ve been following the announcements and discussion after VMworld 2012, you’ll have seen the discussion of the new features during the vSphere 5.1 announcement.

I’ve been confused by the description of enhanced or share-nothing vMotion (what should you call it [internet archive wayback machine]?).

Leverage the advantages of vMotion (zero-downtime migration) without the need for shared storage configurations. This new vMotion capability applies to the entire network. –

What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1

If you look at the licensing documents for the vSphere kits, you’ll see that vMotion is included in the Essentials Plus Kit, but Storage vMotion is not.
VMware vSphere 5 Licensing, Pricing and Packaging (figure 3, page 6)

So the question follows, will Essentials Plus Kit owners be able to do the enhanced vMotion, or will they be dependent on shared storage?  Is the new enhanced vMotion a separately named feature?   Is this just an oversight that will be corrected by pushing Storage vMotion down to the Essentials Plus Kit?  Or will Essentials Plus Kit owners be able to do the new enhanced vMotion but not separate, decoupled Storage vMotion?  Moving storage and run-time control to a new server (enhanced, share-nothing vMotion), or just run-time control with shared storage (our 5.0 vMotion), but not just storage would be an awkward licensing contortion, wouldn’t it?  Bringing Storage vMotion as well as the enhanced vMotion down to Essentials Plus would be the cleanest way.

Thoughts?

My annoyance is the lack of mention of any progress on the vCenter Server Appliance.  There’s one line in the vCenter 5.1 document.

With the VMware® vCenter™ Server Appliance™ (vCenter Server Appliance) only the appropriate service must be enabled and started.  — What’s New in VMware vSphere® 5.1–VMware vCenter Server ™

That’s it.  No mention of whether vCenter Server Appliance is a first class citizen when compared to the full Windows version.  No mention on limitations being lifted.  Remember how the vSphere Storage Appliance 5.0 couldn’t co-exist with vCenter Server Appliance?  Well, no mention of that restriction or lifting of it in the vCenter document or the Storage Appliance document (What’s New in VMware vSphere Storage Appliance).

Annoying.

Photo by bark