Straight from PEX 2015 in San Francisco, here’s a recap of the February 2 announcement for what’s new in vSphere 6.0
Platform Enhancements:
128 vCPUs per VM
4TB of RAM per VM
64 hosts per cluster
12TB of system RAM
480 vCPUs per host
Hot-add RAM is now vNUMA aware
WDDM 1.1 GDI acceleration features
xHCI controller for USB 3 and OSX
Serial and parallel port enhancements (they can now be removed)
Account lockout (after 10 attempts, for 2 minutes) applies to SSH and Web SDK. DCUI is still available.
Can change default password complexity via API call or advanced setting
Improved auditing: All actions now list the actual username doing the action vs. just vpxuser
Support for SQL 2012 AlwaysOn Availability groups within MSCS
IPV6 Support with MSCS
vMotion support for MSCS nodes (with pRDMs)
MSCS supports PVSCSI controllers
New Support for Intel GPUs – vmklinux driver
Expanded NVidia Support
vCenter 6.0 Features
Parity with Windows and Appliance scalability
New Platform Services Controller – Embedded or Centralized model
Linked Mode – Feature Parity with Windows and Appliance. Supports policies and tags
New Certificate Lifecycle Management for vCenter and ESXi
VMCA -VMware Certificate Authority – Provisions certificates
VECS – Stores certificates
Certificate options – VMCA default, VMCA Enterprise, Custom
Cross vSwitch vMotion – vSS to vSS, vSS to vDS, vDS to vDS. Requires L2 network connectivity. Still transparent to Guest.
Cross vCenter vMotion – Simultaneously change Compute, storage, network and vCenter. Targeted for local, metro, intra-continental. Tested u pto 150ms latency.
Long Distance vMotion – Tested up to 150ms. Supports vVols but not required. Needs 250 Mbps per vMotion. VM UUID not changed. MAC address is also preserved. Shares, limits, and reservations are also maintained.
Content library – Simple content management for VM templates, vApps, ISO images and scripts
vSphere C# client still here – Added support for HW v10 and v11 read-only
vSphere web client – Improved login time (13x), right click 4x faster, charts appear faster
Get anywhere in the web client in one click
Brought back recent tasks in the web client
NIOC – Reserve bandwidth to guarantee service levels. Applied at vNIC level.
Multiple TCP/IP stacks – vMotion network will cross L3 boundaries
vMotion can now use its own TCP/IP stack
Storage
vSphere Virtual Volumes – Virtualizes SAN and NAS devices. No more LUNs on block devices.
VVols enables finer control with VM level storage operations using array-based operations
VVols Supports block and NFS protocols
VVols is included with vSphere at all licensing levels
NFS 4.1 with Kerberos
vSphere 6.0 Fault Tolerance
Multi-vCPU support – 4 vCPUs
No longer require EZT disks – Can use any disk format
No support for vVOls
Up to 8 vCPUs protected per host (mix and match VMs)
Greatly increased FT host compatibility
Requires a 10Gb network – Segmented is strongly recommended
Heavily modified version of xvMotion
Each VM has its own vmx config file, vmdsk files. Can store second VM on another array
Supports backup snapshosts (only), no user snapshots
vSphere Replication
End-to-end network compression
Network traffic isolation
Linux file system quiescing
Faster full sync
Same 15 minute RPO
vSphere 6.0 Data Protection
No more advanced edition – All features available in base version
Included with vSphere essentials and higher
Supports up to 800 VMs per vCenter
For ROBOs up to 20 VDP appliances per vCenter
Replicate backup data between VDP appliances and EMC Avamar
EMC Data domain support with DD boost
Automated backup verification
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