VMware released vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1a on May 22nd in reply to a known issue that users were seeing related to logging into vCenter. Users that had a large number of AD groups in their environment would see an error when logging in using SSO. This issue has been fixed in Update 1a and some other improvements were snuck in as well:
- vCenter server can now run on Windows Server 2012
- vCenter not supports SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012
- You can now customize the following Guest OS’s: Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, RHEL 5.9 and Ubuntu 12.04
- The vRAM limit of 192GB has been removed
- And other bug fixes
The upgrade and installation process is the same as previous releases. You can do an in place upgrade from 4.x and up or you can always do a new install. And remember that all the new features within vCenter can only be accessed through the web client, so ditch the desktop client and fully utilize your vCenter.
You can read the full version of VMware’s release notes for vCenter server 5.1u1a here.