The new feature of ESXi 4.1 – Active Directory integration, and also boot from SAN and scriptable installations now making the ESXi THE HYPERVIZOR as a choice for deployments. Vmware warned that vSphere 4.1 is the latest version with ESX classic (with the service console).
With other improvements to the vSphere CLI, like the possibility to force and stop the VM which has become unresponsive, the ESXi is now having most of the features that ESX classic does, and it's now the turn for the third-party vendors to migrate their applications which uses the ESX classic's service console to now use the VMware advanced programming interfaces (APIs).
Great post by Maish at Technodrome and NiTRo at Hypervizor.fr took my attention concerning the AD integration feature. Maish stressed enough with his how-to the AD joining, but NiTRo found a little caveat in vSphere logs when digging deep. What was that? Actually, the MANUAL creation of the “ESX Admins” group in your AD is necessary. If this is not done, the domain name is replaced by “ADMS” and the security role in vCenter is not assigned. The moment you create that group in your AD, the role in vCenter is assigned.
A quote from visdk41pubs:
The host will periodically check the domain controller for the group and will assign the role when the group exists.
