During the last days of August, VMware Unveiled All the Latest Developments in its New vSphere-Based Virtualization Platform 5.5. All the functionalities were presented at VMworld 2013 of San Francisco and in less than two weeks he will present them in Barcelona, where Tundra IT will be present and we look forward to seeing you all!!

Virtual machines

• Version 10 the virtual hardware.

• LSI SAS support for Oracle Solaris 11.
• New advanced SATA controller interface (4 maximum drivers with 30 devices per controller = 120 in total).
• expanded vGPU support (Intel-based GPUs & AMD) and with rendering modes (Automatic, hardware or software).
• Allows graphical acceleration on Linux machines (Ubuntu, Fedora and RHEL).

Virtual Center

• Notable improvements in vSphere Web Client, the installable vSphere Client continues to be installed and supported but does not apply the new features in it. vSphere Web Client fully supported on Mac OS X!!! In addition to being able to drag objects, filter, recent items...
• The previous vCenter Appliance supported a maximum of 5 hosts and 50 VMs (using internal DB in Postgre), now in the 5.5 the appliance supports 100 hosts and 3000 VMs! (Requirements for production environments: HTTP://kb.vmware.com/kb/2057376).

High availability

• New HA functionality, at the application level. Now we will be able to monitor the state of a service or application on a VM and, depending on its state, perform actions at the VM level.
• VM anti-affinity rules can be used as part of an HA failover.

More

• The size of VMDK disks can now be 62TB (before it was 2TB minus 512 bytes) and similarly the size is expanded with RDMs.
• The rest of the capabilities have doubled, regarding the maximum RAM per host (from 2TB to 4TB) or maximum number 32 Virtual CPUs of VMs per physical core (For example, if the host has 2 Xeon processors of 4 Cores, Supports up to 256 VMs with 1 vCPU, or 128 with 2 vCPU).
• FT stays the same :'(

Interesting links

• Quick Reference: HTTP://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2013/09/vSphere-5.5-Quick-Reference-0.5.pdf
• Whats New: HTTP://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-Platform-Whats-New.pdf
• Complete Release Notes: https://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere5/doc/vsphere-esx-vcenter-server-55-release-notes.html

A few weeks ago we held a seminar in Santiago de Compostela for the VMUG of Galicia where we reviewed all the new features offered by the new hypervisor (in addition to doing a comparison with Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 R2, you have all the information at this link: http://www.bujarra.com/comparativa-hipervisores-vmug-galicia/

And finally, to highlight…

vCloud Suite 5.5, VMware NSX (network virtualization platform, a hypervisor with layer support 2 and layer 3), VMware Virtual SAN in the 2014, vCloud Hybrid Cloud Services (thinking about making compatible other cloud platforms with vSphere).