So, I was all into vSphere 5.1 news during and right after VMWorld SF 2012. One of the tidbits I’ve been waiting for is documentation on the vCenter Appliance for vSphere 5.1. According to a VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast on October 8th (at around the 23 minute mark) vCenter Appliance now has feature parity with vCenter Server for Windows and is now fully supported. I recently had a buddy call me about an issue he was having with vCenter in an all Linux environment. I asked him why he didn’t just upgrade the environment to the Linux appliance. He was still under the assumption that the appliance had the traditional limitation due to lack of any announcement or documentation from VMware. I thought that this couldn’t be the case because this is a big feature. After scouring the VMware website for about 1/2 hour, I wasn’t able to find any documentation specific to the appliance.
Justin King (@vcenterguy), the show’s VMware employed guest seemed pretty excited and passionate about the the capabilities of the appliance. I’m pretty surprised at the lack of mention on the VMware site about the new capabilities. I reached out to Justin via twitter and if he responds I’ll update the post.
Has anyone deployed the Appliance in production or even lab to test the features vs. the Windows install? I would imagine there’s a lot of interest for Linux only environment.