If VMware is of any interest to you, you've probably been consumed with the vSphere 5.0 licensing changes, both the ones announced during the product's initial launch and those revealed later, after VMware modified them to be more palatable to upset users who yelled from the top of the virtual mountain.

Marrying the licensing changes with the vSphere 5.0 product announcement was a major marketing faux pas. Not to say that VMware couldn't make licensing changes with the new version, but announcing them at the same time as the new release absolutely took away from the fantastic list of new features and updates. Now that the licensing (debacle) dust has settled, it seems like a good time to revisit the features and enhancements that should have been the focal point of a major new release of VMware vSphere in the first place.

VMware's goal for quite some time has been to enable customers to become 100 percent virtualized, and the features found in vSphere 5.0 have taken great strides toward that goal by removing obstacles that keep people from virtualizing mission-critical applications. One such advance is being able to create monster-sized VMs with 32-way processors and up to 1TB of memory. Another new feature grabbing headlines is around Storage DRS, and its coverage is well deserved. However, with this article I thought I would take the opportunity to spotlight five other areas that may have been overlooked. Beyond these, you can always find a detailed list of features on VMware's website.

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Read the entire InfoWorld Virtualization Report article.