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
- Long Distance vMotion (150ms RTTs)
- Cross vSwitch and vCenter vMotion (min. required bandwidth 250 Mbps)
- 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)
- NFS 4.1 support (stateful!, Kerberos authentication etc)
- VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA) and VMware Endpoint Certificate Services (VECS)
- VMware Virtual Volumes (VVOLS)
- Logical extension of virtualization into the storage world
- Policy based management of storage on per-VM basis
- Eliminates LUN management
- 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
- 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)
- vSphere Replication
- Compression of replication traffic configurable per VM
- Isolation of vSphere Replication host traffic
- Web Client performance and usability improvements (still flash...)
- 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
- 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
- Instant Clones
- No more admin URL with port 5480 in vCSA
- vCSA supports Linked Mode
- 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...