VMware vSphere 6

Ø  As part of vSphere announcement VMware products announced:

·         vSphere with Operations Management 6.0 = vSphere 6.0 + vRealize Operations Manager Standard 6.0 (available since last December);

·         Virtual SAN 6.0, this is actually the second version of the VSAN solution;

·         vCenter Site Recovery Manager 6.0 – no new features, but just for compatibility with vSphere 6.0;

·         vCloud Suite 6.0 -  with support for vSphere 6 in the different components, vRealize Business Standard is now included;

·         VMware Integrated Openstack 1.0 – something to really look at!

Ø  vSphere Maximums

·         64 hosts per cluster;

·         8000 VMs per cluster;

·         480 CPUs;

·         12 TB RAM;

·         1000 VMs per host.

VMs now support a maximum of 128 vCPUs, 4 TB of RAM, vNUMA aware hot-add ram and USB3.

Ø  Improved: Fault Tolerance

With Fault Tolerance you can protect a virtual machine by running a second 100% identical virtual machine on another host. One of the short comings of Fault Tolerance was that it only supports VMs with 1 vCPU. Fault Tolerance in vSphere 6 now finally supports multi-CPU VMs, with up to 4 vCPUs per virtual machine. 10 Gbit network is very much recommended when you plan to use FT on virtual machines with more than 1 vCPU.

FT protected VMs now support VADP enabled backups, including the required snapshot technology. Note that normal snapshots on FT enabled VMs are not supported.

Fault Tolerance protected VMs now always use Fault Tolerance protected storage, secondary storage is required here. It’s now possible to “hot-configure” (enable) FT on a virtual machine.

Ø  Virtual Machine Component Protection

Virtual Machine Component Protection (VMCP) is a new feature in vSphere 6 and an automated response for All Paths Down (APD) or a Permanent Device Loss (PDL) situation. VMCP protects VMs against storage connectivity failures and misconfigurations.

If a APD or PDL condition occurs, VMs are automatically restarted on a healthy host. This is something which is beneficial for stretched cluster architectures, but is of course useful for any environment using some kind of SAN storage. VMCP is currently only available for storage architectures and not yet supporting  network problems.

Ø  vCenter Server 6.0 Platform Services Controller

The Platform Service Controller (PSC) groups Single Sign On (SSO), Licensing and a Certificate Authority (CA). The PSC replaces these separate components and combines these functionality in one solution.

The PSC comes as an embedded option, or in a centralized/stand-alone option when two or more SSO integrated solutions are available. With the PSC linked mode is completely integrated in vSphere: Microsoft ADAM is not required anymore. You can now also add a VCSA to a linked mode, you can even mix appliance- and Windows-based vCenter Servers.

Ø  vCenter Server 6.0 Certificate Lifecycle Management & Clustering Support

You can now use vCenter Server 6 for complete certificate lifecycle management. The VMware Certificate Authority can act as a root CA or issuer CA.

Ø  Improved: vMotion

Some interesting improvements on vMotion are available:

·         Cross vSwitch vMotion – You can now vMotion from a standard switch to a standard switch, a standard switch to a distributed switch and from a distributed switch to a distributed switch and vice versa;

·         Cross vCenter vMotion – You can now vMotion cross vCenter Server which will change compute, storage, network and of course the vCenter Server.

·         Long distance vMotion – Up to 100ms RTT, no VVOLs required, use cases: permanent migration, disaster avoidance, multi-side load balancing, follow the sun.

·         vMotion can now cross layer three boundaries, so a stretched layer two network is not required anymore.

Ø  vCenter Server 6 Content Library           

With the content library you can store and manage content: you have one central location to manage all content. The content is automatically distributed over different vCenter instances. The maximum size of a content library is 64 TB, you can store a maximum of 256 items and you can have a maximum of 10 simultaneous copies. The synchronization of the content library occurs once every 24 hours.