VMware vSphere 6.0 — What’s New?

vSphere 6.0 public beta has been released several months ago and in 2014 VMworld conference some of the new features have been announced. Due to NDA all the features were not disclosed. 

Multi-CPU Fault Tolerance

FT is going to support VM’s with 4 vCPUs and 64GB of RAM. A new feature called fast checkpointing uses a  mechanism to keep primary and secondary VMs in sync. The Record/Replay technology that was previously used is replaced by  Fast checkpointing in vSphere 6.0

 vMotion Enhancements
Earlier upto vSphere 5.5, vMotion was limited to the vCenter/Datacenter boundary but now in vSphere 6.0 vMotion can migrate Virtual Machines across vCenters, virtual switches and routed networks.

Virtual Datacenters
vSphere 6.0 goes one step further than resource Pools. A Virtual Datacenter aggregates CPU, Memory, Storage and Network resources.

vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA)

The VCSA has also been beefed up. With 5.1 you could manage 100 hosts and 3000 powered on VMs. vSphere 6 now allows 1000 hosts and 10,000 powered on VMs. Still Oracle is the only external database supported.

 vSphere Client

VMware has decided to keep on the VI Client for one more release, vSphere 6.0. After that they say it will definitely be gone. Although the Web Client continues to progress and speed up, customer feedback has been that they would like to continue to use the familiar older client for now. No new functionality is being added to the C# Client so although it will be supported, it is only able to manage an ever decreasing subset of vSphere functionality.

Content Library

A way to centrally store VM templates, vApps, ISO images and scripts. The function is similar to the Content Library of vCAC. Content Library’s are replicated over vCenter Server instances. The advantage is a central managed repository preventing for instance severalcopies of  templates of the same guest OS.

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