vsphere 6

vSphere 6: vMotion enhancements

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Don’t we all remember when we witnessed our first vMotion and realized which awesome things this made possible in virtualization?!  In vSphere 6 vMotion even got better!

vMotion version history

First I’d like to give a short overview about what was already achieved in previous versions of vSphere.

vSphere 5.0:

  • Multi-NIC vMotion
    Migration time reduced by making Multi-NIC vMotion possible.
  • Stun During Page Send
    Stunned source machine if needed to progress pre-copy phase of vMotion, so the memory modification rate stays below the precopy transfer rate and the pre-copy will eventually succeed.

vSphere 5.1

  • vMotion without shared storage
    Allows for moving the VM simultaneously to another computing & storage resource at the same time.

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vSphere 6: mClock scheduler & reservations

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“Storage IO Controls – New support for per Virtual Machine storage reservations to guarantee minimum service levels.” Is listed as one of the new features of vSphere 6.

The new mClock scheduler was introduced with vSphere 5.5 and as you might have guessed, it remains the default IO scheduler in vSphere 6 (don’t mind the typo in the description).

 

mClock advanced setting

 

Besides limits and shares, the scheduler now supports reservations. Let’s do a quick recap on resource management.

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vSphere 6: Multi-Processor Fault Tolerance (SMP-FT)

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VMworld 2008; VMware announced Fault Tolerance (FT) in ESX 4 as a new feature that allows continuous availability for selected virtual machines (VM). FT is a technology that allows continuous availability virtual machines with literally zero downtime and zero data loss, even surviving server failures, while staying completely transparent to the guest software stack.

While it was a great new feature; FT enabled VM’s were not a very common sight in datacenter environments.

Legacy FT

FT not being a very common sight in datacenters was mostly due to the restriction of only 1 vCPU per FT virtual machine. This limitation was quite limiting the usability of FT in your datacenter. Most business critical VM’s, that could benefit from FT the most, were in need of multiple vCPU’s in order to meet the performance requirements. Further challenges were the limited options on how to back-up your FT enabled VM’s as creating VMware snapshots was not possible.

Other cluster and host requirements for legacy FT, or UP-FT, were:

  • A HA enabled cluster is required.
  • Shared storage is required.
  • VMDK’s must be eager zeroed thick provisioned.
  • Host CPU’s must be VMware FT capable and belong to the same processor model family.
  • Ensure that all ESX hosts in the VMware HA cluster have identical ESX versions and patch levels.

SMP-FT

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vSphere 6: New features!

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Updated:  As of today (12th of March 2015) vSphere 6 is downloadable! Login to the VMware portal in order to download the following newly released products:

  • vSphere 6
  • vSOM 6
  • vCloud Suite 6
  • SRM 6
  • VSAN 6
  • VMware Integrated OpenStack 1.0

 

Hear, hear!!!  VMware vSphere 6 is here! 🙂

After a period of extensive testing, including a ‘public’ beta test, VMware vSphere 6 is launched today (February the 2nd)!!!

vsphere6-meme

It’s been a while since the last major version release as listed in the table below. vSphere 6 should provide the next step of innovation in server virtualization.

Version Release date
vSphere 6 12 march 2015
vSphere 5.5 22 sep 2013
vSphere 5.1 10 sep 2012
vSphere 5.0  24 aug 2011
vSphere 4.1  13 jul 2010

New features

Check all the new features listed (as found on the VMware website) below:

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VMware vSphere 6 wish list

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UPDATE: VMware announced the public beta for their new vSphere version!! Sign-up here: https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vsphere-beta

 

With the release of the latest vSphere 5.5 version (update 1) in March 2014, VMware once again took a major step in the development of it’s hypervisor and the supplementary software and tools. Finally the vCenter appliance took over from the Windows installed version as the primary choice for vCenter deployment. The Windows installed version now officially supports Windows Server 2012 R2.
In the first 5.5 release various improvements were made; SSO  is enhanced, support for 62TB VMDK, 16Gb FC support to name a few. And of course VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) is now included in the update 1 version!!

VMware-vSphere6

There are some features however still missing. I, for one, would very much like to see these missing features in the next major release of vSphere. Having said that, I don’t expect VMware to announce the release of vSphere 6 this year. I think the coming period will be used by VMware to further engage customers to adopt VSAN and NSX. It will be very interesting to see on what scale these technologies will thrive! !

When thinking of what I would like to see in the vSphere 6 line-up, I came up with the stuff listed below:

  • Multi vCPU FT
  • VUM appliance
  • vSwitch LACP support
  • vCenter built-in autodeploy GUI (like the Fling thing)
  • Linked mode vCSA
  • MSSQL support for external database use with vCSA

Let’s walk through my wish list…

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