VMware announced today the release of vSphere 6.5. With that comes a slew of features and functionality, here give you a quick update about vsphere 6.5 improvement and new features & enhancements.
New Features
vCenter server appliance 6.5 (VCSA)
Migration
vCenter Server Appliance is no longer an issue as the installer has a built in Migration Tool. the steps are easy to migrate and support both CLI and GUI methods.
Improved Appliance Management
Center Server Appliance 6.5 is the improved appliance management capabilities. The vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface continues its evolution and exposes additional health and configurations.
VMware Update Manager
This will be huge for customers who have been waiting to migrate to the vCenter Server Appliance without managing a separate Windows server for VUM.
Native High Availability
New native high availability solution that is available exclusively for the vCenter Server Appliance. This solution consists of Active, Passive, and Witness nodes which are cloned from the existing vCenter Server. Failover within the vCenter HA cluster can occur when an entire node is lost (host failure for example) or when certain key services fail. For the initial release of vCenter HA an RTO of about 5 minutes is expected but may vary slightly depending on load, size, and capabilities of the underlying hardware.
Built-in Backup / Restore
New in vCenter Server 6.5 is built-in backup and restore for the vCenter Server Appliance. This new out-of-the-box functionality enables customers to backup vCenter Server and Platform Services Controller appliances directly from the VAMI or API, and also backs up both VUM and Auto Deploy running embedded with the appliance.
HTML5-based vSphere Client
vSphere 6.5 is fully supported version of the HTML5-based vSphere Client that will run alongside the vSphere Web Client. The vSphere Client is built right into vCenter Server 6.5 (both Windows and Appliance) and is enabled by default.
Resource Management – HA, FT and DRS
Slightly restructured vSphere continues to provide the best availability and resource management features for today’s most demanding applications. vSphere 6.5 continues to move the needle by adding major new features and improving existing features to make vSphere the most trusted virtual computing platform available.
Improved Admission Control Policies :
VM Restart Priorities: new restart priorities added such as highest and lowest in addition to High, medium, low which available from previous versions.
HA Orchestrated Restart: Enforce VM to VM dependency chains. This is great for multi-tier applications the require VMs to restart in a particular order. (DB, App and then Web Vm).
Proactive HA will detect hardware conditions of a host and allow you to evacuate the VMs before the issue causes an outage. Working in conjunction with participating hardware vendors, vCenter will plug into the hardware monitoring solution to receive the health status of the monitored components such as fans, memory, and power supplies. vSphere can then be configured to respond according to the failure.
vSphere HA Admission Control
vSphere 6.5, this configuration just got simpler. The first major change is that the administrator simply needs to define the number of host failures to tolerate (FTT). Once the numbers of hosts are configured, vSphere HA will automatically calculate a percentage of resources to set aside by applying the “Percentage of Cluster Resources” admission control policy. As hosts are added or removed from the cluster, the percentage will be automatically recalculated. This is the new default configuration, but it is possible to override the automatic calculation or use another admission control policy.
DRS Advanced Options
M Distribution: DRS detects a severe imbalance to the performance, it will correct the performance issue at the expense of the count being evenly distributed.
Memory Metric for Load Balancing: DRS uses Active memory + 25% as its primary metric when calculating memory load on a host. The Consumed memory vs active memory will cause DRS to use the consumed memory metric rather than Active. This is beneficial when memory is not over-allocated.
CPU over-commitment: This is an option to enforce a maximum vCPU:pCPU ratios in the cluster. Once the cluster reaches this defined value, no additional VMs will be allowed to power on.
Fault Tolerance (FT)
vSphere 6.5 FT has more integration with DRS which will help make better placement decisions by ranking the hosts based on the available network bandwidth as well as recommending which datastore to place the secondary vmdk files.
Network-Aware DRS
DRS now considers network utilization, in addition to the 25+ metrics already used when making migration recommendations. DRS observes the Tx and Rx rates of the connected physical uplinks and avoids placing VMs on hosts that are greater than 80% utilized. DRS will not reactively balance the hosts solely based on network utilization, rather, it will use network utilization as an additional check to determine whether the currently selected host is suitable for the VM. This additional input will improve DRS placement decisions, which results in better VM performance.
Content Library
Content Library with vSphere 6.5 includes some very welcome usability improvements. Administrators can now mount an ISO directly from the Content Library, apply a Guest OS Customization during VM deployment, and update existing templates.
