What’s New in VMware vSphere 6.0? Part 1
I thought that it would be a good idea that I do a post on what’s new in VMware’s latest major increment of vSphere.
This is part 1 of several posts where I’ll be looking at 6.0!
So what’s new in vSphere 6.0? You’ll have to wait til March to get your hands on it but there’s quite a lot as you would imagine from any major update.
This post will be a start at taking a look at the improvements that VMware has made to ESXi 6.0, and there are several that will certainly be notable when updating any future planning you have for your environment.
The big ticket items that every article I have read so far are talking about are the VSAN improvements, VVOLs architecture, vMotion, Fault Tolerance and vCenter updates.
More Scalability!
That’s right! ESXi is a much more scalable animal in its new 6.0 incarnation with clusters now able to scale to 64 hosts (double previous versions!). I had a good chuckle when Eric Siebert coined it the “Monster Host” on his recent post on 6.0!
vSphere 6.0 can now also support 8,000 VMs per cluster providing for greater consolidation ratios, more efficient use of vSphere DRS and fewer clusters that need to be managed separately!
Each hypervisor instance is also now able to support up to 480 physical CPUs, 12TB of RAM and 1,000 VMs!
Now let’s see how many people actually crack their hosts up to 1000vms and are not a “bit” nervous!? 🙂
VSAN 6.0
VSAN 6.0 rolls out with vSphere 6.0 and brings some significant performance enhancements along with a whole bunch of new features! Top of the “cool list” is that VSAN now can support “ALL FLASH” meaning that you don’t need spinning disks in your life any more if you so desire!
This was obviously the natural progression as Flash begins to devour spinning media over time, obviously you can still configure hybrid VSAN but it was necessary for VMware to go the ALL FLASH route!
So what else is there? Well, including going ALL- FLASH there’s this:
We already discussed earlier in this article the number of hosts per cluster going to 64. On top of this the number of IOPS per host has increased from 20K to 100K (40k in hybrid), and the number of VMs per cluster from 3200 to 6000. Also the maximum supported virtual disk size has increased from 2TB to a whopping 62TB!
Also in vSphere 6 a new file system has been introduced called VSAN FS that’s optimized for VSAN architecture. This upgrade is optional but you should really consider doing it so that you have access to all of the shiny new VSAN features!
There’s also a lot more out there in vSAN and VMware has a great summary document! I’d recommend you check it out as it’s pretty comprehensive (well… a bit more than this post anyway!).
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsan/VMware_Virtual_SAN_Whats_New.pdf
I hope you are all looking forward to getting your mitts on vSphere 6.0 in March! I’ll be looking at other new features in the 6.0 release in my next blog post!
As always, if you have any thoughts or comments, drop us a line.
🙂
