What's new in vSphere 6.0? New features list.

By | March 14, 2015

2nd of February VMware announced a vSphere 6 with the following features! One of the most awaited features are: vSMP Fault Tolerance, Long Distance vMotion and across vCenter, VMware Virtual Volumes (VVOLs).

There are new features as follow:

vSphere and vCenter

  1. Long Distance vMotion (150ms RTTs)
  2. Cross vSwitch and vCenter vMotion (min.  required bandwidth 250 Mbps)
  3. vSMP Fault Tolerance - at last!
    • Up to 4 vCPUs and 64GB RAM
    • Fast Check-Pointing has replaced the “Record-Replay”
    • Supports all Virtual Disk Type like Thick or Thin Provisioned
    • Backup support with snapshots through VADP such NetBackup or vSphere Data Protection
    • Supports vMotion of both Primary and Secondary Virtual Machine
    • Storage redundancy such VDDK copies on separate datastores
    • Max 4 Protected VMs or 8 vCPU per ESXi host (it depends on which reaches first)
  4. NFS 4.1 support (stateful!, Kerberos authentication etc)
  5. VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA) and VMware Endpoint Certificate Services (VECS)
  6. VMware Virtual Volumes (VVOLS)
    • Logical extension of virtualization into the storage world
    • Policy based management of storage on per-VM basis
    • Eliminates LUN management
  7. Maximum Configurations:
    • 64 hosts per cluster
    • 8000 VMs per cluster
    • 480 CPUs per host
    • 12TB of memory
    • 2048 VMs per host
    • 128 vCPUs per VM
    • 4TB RAM per VM
    • 1000 Hosts per vCenter
    • 10000 VMs per vCenter
  8. Virtual Hardware v11
    • 128 vCPUs per VM
    • 4 TB RAM per VM
    • Hot-add RAM now vNUMA aware
    • Serial and parallel port enhancements (max 32 serial ports)
  9. vSphere Replication
    • Compression of replication traffic configurable per VM
    • Isolation of vSphere Replication host traffic
  10. Web Client performance and usability improvements (still flash...)
  11. Enhanced Microsoft Clustering (MSCS) Support
    • Support for Windows 2012 R2 and SQL 2012
    • Failover Clustering and AlwaysOn Availability Groups
    • IPv6 Support
    • PVSCSI & SCSI controller support
    • vMotion Support
  12. Content Library
    • Repository for vApps, VM templates, ISOs but also scripts
    • Publisher/Subscriber model with two replication models
    • Can be synchronized across sites and vCenter servers
  13. Instant Clones
  14. No more admin URL with port 5480 in vCSA
  15. vCSA supports Linked Mode
  16. Two vCSA deployment methods: Embedded Platform Services Controller and External Platform Services Controller

vSphere Data Protection (VDP)

vSphere Data Protection now includes all vSphere Data Protection Advanced features and included for free to Essentials + and higher editions of vSphere!

  • Up to 8TB of deduped data per VDP Appliance
  • Up to 20 VDP appliances per vCenter
  • Up to 800 VMs per VDP Appliance
  • Application level backup and restore of SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint
  • Replication to other VDP Appliances and EMC Avamar
  • Data Domain support with DD Boost
  • Automated backup verification

 VSAN

  • Virtual Disk size up to 62Tb
  • Scales up to 64 nodes
  • 32 VM snapshots
  • All flash configurations (100K IOPS per Host)

 

and more and more features...

Author: Mariusz

Architect (~ 15 years experience based on passion...) with strong background as a System Administrator and Engineer. Focused on Data Center Solutions: Virtualization/Cloud Computing and Storage/Backup Systems. Currently living in Poland.