vCenter Appliance as a "First Choice"

This session discussed how the Appliance under v6.0 has been brought to parity with the Windows vCenter installations as far as the maximum size supported.  The appliance has come a long way from it's first iteration that had a maximum of 5 hosts and 50 VMs.  Today the numbers are the same for both platforms at 1000 hosts and 10,000 VMs.

Here's a summary of my notes:

• Faster Deployment and lower TCO
• No Windows or SQL licenses required
• Single VM covers both the database and the vCenter services
• Security Hardened SUSE 11 SP3
• They have a dedicated team @ VMware to tuning the appliance for security and resiliency
• Large sized appliance actually outperforms the Windows vCenter in transactions / sec
• New features coming in 6.0 U1 (Q3-Q4)
• Converting to external PSC will finally be supported
• VAMI appliance configuration page is back and written in HTML5!
• Migration tool (Fling) available to Migrate 5.5 and 6.0 from Windows to the Appliance
• The was a demo that shows the web interface, which allows you to migrate just the configuration data, or the data plus historical stats (performance data