Last month VMware released its new version of server virtualization solution, vSphere 6.0. A new version that brings many expected novelties such as having FT with more than 1 core or great novelties in vMotion among others!

News

When installing vCenter, we will have new wizards that will allow us to install the installer for vCenter Server more easily, such as deploying the vCenter Server Appliance, being able to customize ports, Paths… in addition, VMware deploys the latter in ISO format, that once assembled we will start the installation/update with a new installation interface. We will be able to install new scripts that come in these media, as well as upgrade vSphere installations 5.1 or 5.5 Existing.

vCenter Server support on OS equal to or higher than Windows Server 2008 SP2 (always 64 bit) with:

• 2 CPU & 8GB RAM: Until 10 Hosts & 100 Mvs.
• 4 CPU & 16GB RAM: Until 100 Hosts & 1000 Mvs.
• 8 CPU & 24GB RAM: Until 400 Hosts & 4000 Mvs.
• 16 CPU & 32GB RAM: Until 1000 Hosts & 10000 Mvs.

Installations up to 20 hosts or 200 VMs will be able to use PostgreSQL that comes with the vSphere ISO. For higher environments we should use SQL 2008 R2, 2012 or 2014, in addition to Oracle 11g and 12c

If we have SQL Server Express in 5.x when migrating vSphere, will migrate the DB to VMware vPostgres.

Maximum:

• Support up to 128 vCPUs and 4TB of RAM for the VMs.
• Support up to 480 Physical CPUs, 12TB of RAM, 1024 MVs and 32 Serial ports for hosts, as well as parallels.
• Support for up to 64TB of datastore.
• Support up to 64 Hosts per cluster.

Support for the latest x86 chip sets, drivers or new OSs such as Solaris 11.2, Asianux 4 SP4, Ubuntu 12.04.5, Ubuntu 14.04.1, Oracle 7, FreeBSD 9.3, Mac OS X 10.10…

RAM hot-add improvements to vNUMA (not only to the region 0), GDI WDDM acceleration 1.1, USB 3.0 xHCI... all in a new version of Virtual Hardware 11!

We have a new deployment architecture in vSphere, PSCs or Platform Service Controllers are introduced, which is made up of 3 services such as SSO (Single Sign-On), VMCA & Licensing Service (VMware Certificate Authority) On the one hand, that will allow us to separate these roles from the vCenter server (externally) or embedded with the vCenter (Designed for standalone sites); in the case of having it separate, it will be to have HA or replicate with another PSC from another site. Maximum of 8 PSCs per SSO site.

Instant Clone, new cloning technology integrated into vSphere 6.0, that allows you to clone and deploy VMs 10 times faster than we are traditionally used to.

SIOC (Storage I/O Control) enhanced, allows you to make storage reservations by VMs, being able to guarantee service levels.

NIOC (Network I/O Control) Enhanced in Distributed Virtual Switches, with which we can now limit and reserve by bandwidth of the VMs.

With Virtual Volumes or VVols, VMware takes a step further for storage manufacturers to be able to process the contents of LUNs and have greater granular visibility into datastore objects such as VMDKs.

vMotion brings 3 Great news, the first is that we will already be able to migrate VMs between different vCenter servers! The second interesting novelty is that it adds the possibility of making vMotion also from virtual switches, Good option for network migrations! And the last but just as good novelty is that we will be able to vMotion over long distances! As long as the latency is greater than 100ms!

We finally have a more than requested feature, What is FT Support (Fault Tolerance) multiprocessor! being able to enable FT in VMs that have up to 4 vCPUs! Until now we knew about the possibility of doing it in MVs with 1 vCPU.

We will also have a new interface to manage VMware certificates via command line called VMware Certificate Lifecycle Management; NFS support 4.1 and authentication using Kerberos; vCloud Air integration; more supported apps for HA App (High Application Availability); vSphere Web Client Enhancements… and so on!

Official link to key news: HTTP://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-Whats-New.pdf

Official link with all the news: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-Platform-Whats-New.pdf

VMware vSphere Editions 6