What’s new in vSphere 6.5?

Let’s begin with the Configuration maximums:

• Virtual Hardware v.13
• RAM per VM has been enhanced to 4TB to 6TB.
• Maximum powered on machines from a vCenter has been increased to 10,000 to 20,000.

vCenter:

• vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 (VCSA) – vSphere 6.5 makes the vCenter Server Appliance the fundamental building block of a vSphere environment.
• The VCSA appliance runs on top of Photon OS now.
• File-based backup and recovery
• Native VCSA high availability
• VMware Update Manager is now integrated with vCSA. – no need of a separate VM.
• Enhanced vCenter Install, Upgrade, Migrate and restore – Pervious versions don’t have Migrate and restore and this features is now available in 6.5. Also it has some inbuilt backups as well.
• No Client integration plugin required for vSphere web Client.
• HTML5 web client

VMware HA and DRS improvements:

• HA – Admission Control – Admission Control is a feature that watches over the vSphere Cluster to ensure that ample demand remains in the event of a failure. Specifically, it blocks the power on operations for VMs that would violate the needed resources for a cluster.
• HA Orchestrated Restart – vSphere 6.5 now allows creating dependency chains using VM-to-VM rules.  These dependency rules are enforced if when vSphere HA is used to restart VMs from failed hosts.  This is great for multi-tier applications that do not recover successfully unless they are restarted in a particular order.  A common example to this is a database, app, and web server.
• Proactive HA – This is most awaited feature. Its proactively move VMs to another host if the current host start experiencing partial failure.
• Network-aware DRS – This feature looks at host network saturation for the physical uplinks and avoids placing VMs on a host that has an over-subscribed network. 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.

vSphere Web Client:

Here is a list of few high-impact improvements will help with the overall user experience with the vSphere Web Client while development continues with the HTML5-based vSphere Client:

• Inventory tree is the default view
• Home screen reorganized
• Renamed “Manage” tab to “Configure”
• Removed “Related Objects” tab
• Performance improvements (VM Rollup at 5000 instead of 50 VMs)
• Live refresh for power states, tasks, and more!

vSphere Client:

vSphere client 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.
Below are some of the benefits to the new vSphere Client:

• Clean, consistent UI built on VMware’s new Clarity UI standards (to be adopted across our portfolio)
• Built on HTML5 so it is truly a cross-browser and cross-platform application
• No browser plugins to install/manage
• Integrated into vCenter Server for 6.5 and fully supported
• Fully supports Enhanced Linked Mode
• Users of the Fling have been extremely positive about its performance

Storage:

There is some enhancement on the core storage side as well. I will explain all the new features in my upcoming posts. Please standby.

• VMFS-6
• UNMAP
• Linux Guest OS SPC-4 support
• NFS 4.1 Improvements
• iSCSI Improvements
• SIOC version 2
• VM Encryption

Security :

• VMDK Encryption Manageability
• Encrypted vMotion
• Secure Boot Support for ESXi Host and Guest VM