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VMware vSphere v6.0 officially announced

Arthur

By Arthur
in Thin Client and Virtual Machines

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Arthur

Arthur

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Click here to be notified via e-mail when vSphere 6.0 is available to download.

 

Overview / What's New / Datasheet

 

VMware vSphere 6.0, the industry-leading virtualization platform, empowers users to virtualize any application with confidence, redefines availability, and simplifies the virtual data center. The result is a highly available, resilient, on-demand infrastructure that is the ideal foundation for any cloud environment. This blockbuster release contains the following new features and enhancements, many of which are industry-first features*:

 

Compute

  • Increased Scalability – Increased configuration maximums: Virtual machines will support up to 128 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and 4TB virtual RAM (vRAM). Hosts will support up to 480 CPU and 12TB of RAM, 2,048 virtual machines per host, and 64 nodes per cluster.
  • Expanded Support – Expanded support for the latest x86 chipsets, devices, drivers, and guest operating systems. For a complete list of guest operating systems supported, see the VMware Compatibility Guide.
  • Amazing Graphics – NVIDIA GRID™ vGPU™ delivers the full benefits of NVIDIA hardware-accelerated graphics to virtualized solutions.
  • Instant Clone* – Technology, built in vSphere 6.0, that lays that foundation to rapidly clone and deploy virtual machines, as much as 10x faster than what is currently possible today

Storage

  • Transform Storage for your Virtual Machines – vSphere Virtual Volumes* enables your external storage arrays to become VM-aware. Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) allows common management across storage tiers and dynamic storage class of service automation. Together they enable exact combinations of data services (such as clones and snapshots) to be instantiated more efficiently on a per VM basis

Network

  • Network IO Control– New support for per-VM Distributed vSwitch bandwidth reservations to guarantee isolation and enforce limits on bandwidth.
  • Multicast Snooping - Supports IGMP snooping for IPv4 packet and MLD snooping for IPv6 packets in VDS. Improves performance and scale with multicast traffic.
  • Multiple TCP/IP stack for vMotion - Allows vMotion traffic a dedicated networking stack. Simplifies IP address management with a dedicated default gateway for vMotion traffic.

Availability

  • vMotion Enhancements – Perform non-disruptive live migration of workloads across distributed switches and vCenter Servers and over distances of up to 100ms RTT. The astonishing 10x increase in RTT offered in long-distance vMotion now makes it possible for data centers physically located in New York and London to migrate live workloads between one another.
  • Replication-Assisted vMotion* – Enables customers, with active-active replication set up between two sites, to perform a more efficient vMotion resulting in huge time and resource savings – as much as 95 percent more efficient depending on the size of the data.
  • Fault Tolerance] (up to 4-vCPUs) – Expanded support for software based fault tolerance for workloads with up to 4 virtual CPUs

Management

  • Content Library – Centralized repository that provides simple and effective management for content including virtual machine templates, ISO images and scripts. With vSphere Content Library, it is now possible to store and manage content from a central location and share through a publish/subscribe model.
  • Cross-vCenter Clone and Migration* – Copy and move virtual machines between hosts on different vCenter Servers in a single action.
  • Enhanced User Interface – Web Client is more responsive, more intuitive, and more streamlined than ever before.

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john

john

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I'm saddened to see even more going into the poor and naff web interface :( Its such a poor interface and a lot slower to run and do basic and simple tasks than the software.
FN-GM

FN-GM

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Posted
I'm saddened to see even more going into the poor and naff web interface :( Its such a poor interface and a lot slower to run and do basic and simple tasks than the software.

 

Agreed!

Ric_

Ric_

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Posted

I attended the webinar on Monday for this announcement. There's a few nice new features but on the whole it is pretty meh. Native OpenStack support is good to have (you'll have to be an Enterprise Plus customer mind) and some of the performance improvements sound promising. There's also some nice stuff in the storage features.

 

The cross-vCenter and long-distance vMotions sounds awesome, until you realise that you need under 100ms latency which basically rules out most usefullness.

 

As for the hardware compatibility and GPU support... other hypervisors have had this for ages and VMWare is just playing catch up.

 

Oh... and I prefer the web interface :-P

john

john

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Posted

 

Oh... and I prefer the web interface :-P

 

Your just trolling :p It is awful and you know it deep down and takes twice as long to do tasks as it does in the full fat client but they say they made it work in the new one so I'll let you upgrade first and check it out with you then :)

  • 1 month later...
Arthur

Arthur

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Why does VMware do this? :confused: :mad:

 

www.v-front.de/2015/03/vsphere-6-is-ga-ultimate-guide-to.html

 

When VMware released ESXi 5.5 in 2013 they decided to drop some drivers for NICs from it that are commonly used in consumer grade hardware: r8168 and r8169 for Realtek chips, sky2 for Marvell chips (and less common: s2io for Neterion 10Gb cards). Luckily you could still keep them installed when upgrading from ESXi 5.1 to 5.5 or install them later on top of ESXi 5.5.

 

With ESXi 6.0 VMware goes a step further and actively prevents installing these drivers by using a blacklisting method that is based on VIB package dependencies! The ESXi system package misc-drivers is flagged to replace the above mentioned driver packages which means that you cannot install misc-drivers and any of these drivers - misc-drivers though is absolutely necessary for ESXi so you must install that!

Norphy

Norphy

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Posted

If I had to guess, I'd say that the 8168 and the like are too rubbish to work reliably on the platform and that they are disabling them because they're responsible for too many support calls.

 

Better to have supported hardware for a platform like VMware than run it on anything

mrbios

mrbios

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Wasn't expecting this to be released until the end of the month, that's a pleasant surprise :) (Not sure how i missed this on friday though!)
Arthur

Arthur

Posted
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Better to have supported hardware for a platform like VMware than run it on anything

I suppose, although it's less of an issue in a home lab environment where you are the only user. :)

3s-gtech

3s-gtech

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Posted
I like to keep my hosts fairly up-to-date, but these updates won't bring any benefits to us and the limitations put into the client are a downer. As we only use VMware Free though, I can't really complain!
truebluesteve

truebluesteve

Posted
Posted
I'm saddened to see even more going into the poor and naff web interface :( Its such a poor interface and a lot slower to run and do basic and simple tasks than the software.

 

+1 for this. I never use it simply because its so flipping cumbersome. The upgrade has come at a good time though as we will be installing some new hosts in the very near future!

mrbios

mrbios

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Posted
Just don't forget to make sure your backup software is happy with it before you jump on it :) (As well as anything you use that offers vmware plugins, as they can often take a while to get updated/compatible versions out)
john

john

Posted
Posted
Just don't forget to make sure your backup software is happy with it before you jump on it :) (As well as anything you use that offers vmware plugins, as they can often take a while to get updated/compatible versions out)

 

No sign of Symantec support for it yet or even any mention of when it may turn up from my googling's

mrbios

mrbios

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Posted
No sign of Symantec support for it yet or even any mention of when it may turn up from my googling's

 

To be honest most companies tend to take up to 6 months to catch up with new major releases, i'd expect symantec to be towards the higher end of that. Albeit don't expect too much in the way of information from symantec...the last time i waited for them to catch up there was no information or answers to be had from anywhere, then one day out of the blue "oh we support this now, updated that last week" :|

 

Don't think there's any features i can't wait until the summer for anyway luckily :)

john

john

Posted
Posted
To be honest most companies tend to take up to 6 months to catch up with new major releases, i'd expect symantec to be towards the higher end of that. Albeit don't expect too much in the way of information from symantec...the last time i waited for them to catch up there was no information or answers to be had from anywhere, then one day out of the blue "oh we support this now, updated that last week" :|

 

Don't think there's any features i can't wait until the summer for anyway luckily :)

 

We are used to this, 2012 R2 support took forever as did 2012..... We hoped given they supported the U1 for them quite quickly (but most people didn't spot that they needed a patch to be officially supported on 2012 R2 U1) so they are sneaky. Expect SP3 to have it in at a guess but maybe wrong.

john

john

Posted
Posted
To be honest most companies tend to take up to 6 months to catch up with new major releases, i'd expect symantec to be towards the higher end of that. Albeit don't expect too much in the way of information from symantec...the last time i waited for them to catch up there was no information or answers to be had from anywhere, then one day out of the blue "oh we support this now, updated that last week" :|

 

Don't think there's any features i can't wait until the summer for anyway luckily :)

 

So I did some digging, NetBackup is out and supported already, Backup Exec 2015 will be the first to take VMware 6.0, as a result that hasn't got a due date yet so that's helpful....

Chris_

Chris_

Posted
Posted

 

This is why I'm holding off upgrading our vSphere cluster. I spoke to Veeam at the RM Seminars earlier this week and he echoed the message that Veeam have sent out this morning about holding back as the next update for Veeam won't be out for a few weeks.

 

I don't think vSphere 6 brings any real benefits for us anyway so there's no rush here :)

  • 3 months later...
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