Benefits of ESXi 5.0 U1 free over ESXi 4.1 U2 free?

[Alceryes]

I will be upgrading my ESXi box soon from a C2D 2.8Ghz with 8GB RAM to a Phenom II x4 965 with 16GB's RAM.

I'm wondering if there's any benefit to going to 5.0 U1 over the 4.1 U2 version that I'm currently using(?) I will just be importing the .vmx and .vmdk files from a backup to the new build. I will never need a volume larger than 2TB and this is a home lab environment so it will never need to be upgraded to a paid version. The MB supports a maximum of 32GB's so the memory limitation of ESXi 5.0 free isn't a concern.

So, will I gain anything?

[mikelane · Accepted solution]

I would look at these links:

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/esxi-and-esx/compare.html#understand

http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere5/doc/vsphere-esx-vcenter-server-50-new-features.html

But for the free version USB 3, and other New virtual machine capabilities will likely interest you.

Other features that might be relevant:

Host UEFI boot support

VMFS5

Hope that this helps?

[maishsk]

One thing that comes to mind - is the support for 8vCPU's but limited to 32GB of RAM per host as well

Maish

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Author of VMware vSphere Design

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