vSphere 6.0 finally announced! and not yet released

I would like to share the quick post which details what is in vSphere 6.0 / what is new.


vSphere 6

Virtual Volumes

• Long Distance vMotion
• Cross vSwitch and vCenter vMotion
• vMotion of MSCS VMs using pRDMs
• vMotion L2 adjacency restrictions are lifted!
• vSMP Fault Tolerance
• Content Library
• NFS 4.1 support
• Instant Clone aka VMFork
• vSphere HA Component Protection
• Storage DRS and SRM support
• Storage DRS deep integration with VASA to understand thin provisioned, deduplicated, replicated or compressed datastores!
• Network IO Control per VM reservations
• Storage IOPS reservations
• Introduction of Platform Services Controller architecture for vCenter
• SSO, licensing, certificate authority services are grouped and can be centralized for multiple vCenter Server instances
• Linked Mode support for vCenter Server Appliance
• Web Client performance and usability improvements
• Max Config:
• 64 hosts per cluster
• 8000 VMs per cluster
• 480 CPUs per host
• 12TB of memory
• 1000 VMs per host
• 128 vCPUs per VM
• 4TB RAM per VM

vSphere Replication

• Compression of replication traffic configurable per VM
• Isolation of vSphere Replication host traffic
• vSphere Data Protection now includes all vSphere Data Protection Advanced functionality
• Up to 8TB of deduped data per VDP Appliance
• 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

Virtual SAN 6

All flash configurations

Blade enablement through certified JBOD configurations

Fault Domain aka “Rack Awareness”

Capacity planning / “What if scenarios”

Support for hardware-based checksumming / encryption

Disk serviceability (Light LED on Failure, Turn LED on/off manually etc)

Disk / Diskgroup maintenance mode aka evacuation

Virtual SAN Health Services plugin

Greater scale

64 hosts per cluster

200 VMs per host

62TB max VMDK size

New on-disk format enables fast cloning and snapshotting

32 VM snapshots

From 20K IOPS to 40K IOPS in hybrid configuration per host (2x)

90K IOPS with All-Flash per host