What’s New In VMware vSphere 6? – Part 1

Top Improvements

Last week VMware released vSphere 6 for general availability. While it has been in Beta since June, 2014, it’s now being installed around the world. EMC² has announced full support and integration for the vSphere 6, and the new release touted as the hybrid cloud solution is really gathering momentum.

VMware claims over 650 new features, with the headliner features concentrated in these 5 areas:

• Compute power

  • Increased scalability for more powerful hosts and virtual machines
  • Updated support for current x86 chipsets, devices, guest OSs and drivers
  • NVIDIA hardware accelerated graphics now delivered to VMs (Grid vGPU™)
  • One-click cloning touted to be ten times faster than prior releases

• Storage integration

  • Virtual volumes allowing external storage to become VM-aware with SPBM (storage policy-based management)

• Networking

  • Per-VM distributed vSwitch bandwidth reservations
  • Multicast snooping for improved performance and scalability
  • vMotion across a dedicated network stack (allowance for multiple stacks)

• Availability

  • Hot vMotion across vCenters and distributed switches up to 100ms RTT. Long distance vMotion now enabled.
  • vMotion across active-active replication sites
  • Fault tolerance for workloads with up to 4 vCPUs

• Management

  • Content library with VM templates, ISOs and scripts
  • One-click cloning and migration across vCenters
  • New look UI intended to increase intuitiveness

You can review an in-depth white paper discussing the new release 6 features here.

Here’s a table comparing some of vSphere 6’s enhancements over vSphere 5.5 and Hyper-V 2012 R2:

Read part two: What’s New With Virtual Volumes?