Module 7: Virtual Machines
Again not much different, higher maximums etc. How to create, clone, template etc.
New items of interest are the changes to the Summary tab, the addition of the storage views tab
New boot options in edit settings where you can force the VM to go into the bios on boot. Which is great after you have installed say a windows guest OS and want to change something to the bios and because you have difficultly getting the VM take focus from the mouse click and then pressing F2 before the OS actually starts to load. This is a great feature, used almost immediately when i first installed a VM on vSphere.
To extend of HDD is good, depends on the OS to actually make use of the additional disk immediately, in most Windows environments this is simply a disk management rescan and using disk part or equivalent tools.

Storage Views tab, allows you to see all the files that make up the VM, the datastore location of every file and most importantly the actual size of every file. I like this a lot.
Can now import appliances direct from the VMware market place, not sure how good this is for Production however I can see it’s usefulness in an evaluation / dev environment.
Deploy from OVF, more of the same as above. Though with the ability to deploy vApps in OVF format you could now create your own vApps on an internal intranet for easy storage and access for other teams to use pre-configured systems for Dev and Test.
Converter currently (Nov 2009) has an issue where you try to convert to a VM and connect it to a vDS (vNetwork Distributed Switch) The conversion will fail. Workaround: need to select a standard vSwitch for the conversion, then move later / after the conversion completed. Will apparently be fixed in the next release/update.
Storage VMotion during the wizard when selecting the target datastore if you click the Advanced button the wizard allows the moving of one or more of the VMDK to different and or same datastores. For example I have an Exchange server in dev on slow LUNs (SATA disks say) to start with but now I would like to up the ante and do some better testing with more transactions and notice the log partition is running like the proverbial, well talk to my SAN guys to provision a faster LUN (FC SCSI disks), sVMotion the logs vmdk only to the FC LUN and better performance I get.
SVMotion has apparently been rewritten so that the requirement for double the VMs allocated memory is no longer required when doing a sVMotion.

Module 8: Access Control
More privileges, still the same lame descriptions though. Good example from personal experience is the Low level file permissions on a Datastore. Not being a storage person there is certain connotations that that has for me and no way I want any old joe having access to that. Having said that what this actually means is that a user can upload a file to a datastore. Why would I want a user to do that? Well if you have a LUN for ISO images, this is exactly what you will need it for. If you have installed ESXi or ESXi installable, have you tried to find the vmimages directory to copy iso files to? I couldn’t find it, apparently the reason for this is that VMware is phasing this out as in a cluster this location is specific to the host and is not replicated across the other ESX servers in the cluster and so VMware was getting support calls from users complaining. Makes sense to me.
The ability to assign permissions on datastores is a good addition. You may think this is not so good as you might have to assign permissions individually, not the case. go to the Datastores view, create a folder drag all the datastores you wish to assign the same permissions to and assign the permissions at the datastore folder level. This folder will not appear in the Host and Cluster views nor the VMs and Templates view.
Most other things the same.

Module 9: Resource Monitoring
The VMtools has introduces into Windows Guest OSes performance objects for performance monitor called VM Processor and VM memory to allow you the actual CPU and Memory utilisation alongside observed CPU and memory utilisation of the guest OS. This looks good since before the we would have to look at both the guest performance monitor and the VI client to get this information, now we can see both in one place to be a better guide in performance related troubleshooting.
The performance tab for hosts and VMs has been updated a little and now contains an Overview button, which is the default view with bigger graphs and a single view of the four resources on one page. The old view are still available in the Advanced button for more deep dive functionality.
Alarms, heaps more default alarms, you can do more with them and tweak them better. A good example is now you can tweak for how long a particular trigger has been met before an alarms is activated. For example CPU going over 75% would immediately trigger a green to yellow alarm. Now we can set this to only change state when the CPU stays over 75% for more than say 5 mins. Much better, less false positives better fine grained control. In both directions into alarm state and back out of alarm states.