Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vSphere 6.0 finally announced!

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Today Pat Gelsinger and Ben Fathi announced vSphere 6.0. (if you missed it you can still sign up for other events) I know many of you have been waiting on this and are ready to start your download engines but please note that this is just the announcement of GA… the bits will follow shortly. I figured I would do a quick post which details what is in vSphere 6.0 / what is new.There were a lot of announcements today, but I am just going to cover vSphere 6.0 and VSAN. I have some more detailed posts to come so I am not gonna go in to a lot of depth in this post, I just figured I would post a list of all the stuff that is in the release… or at least that I am aware off, some stuff wasn’t broadly announced.

  • vSphere 6
    • Virtual Volumes
      • Want “Virtual SAN” alike policy based management for your traditional storage systems? That is what Virtual Volumes will bring in vSphere 6.0. If you ask me this is the flagship feature in this release.
    • Long Distance vMotion
    • Cross vSwitch and vCenter vMotion
    • vMotion of MSCS VMs using pRDMs
    • vMotion L2 adjacency restrictions are lifted!
    • vSMP Fault Tolerance
    • Content Library
    • NFS 4.1 support
    • Instant Clone aka VMFork
    • vSphere HA Component Protection
    • Storage DRS and SRM support
    • Storage DRS deep integration with VASA to understand thin provisioned, deduplicated, replicated or compressed datastores!
    • Network IO Control per VM reservations
    • Storage IOPS reservations
    • Introduction of Platform Services Controller architecture for vCenter
      • SSO, licensing, certificate authority services are grouped and can be centralized for multiple vCenter Server instances
    • Linked Mode support for vCenter Server Appliance
    • Web Client performance and usability improvements
    • Max Config:
      • 64 hosts per cluster
      • 8000 VMs per cluster
      • 480 CPUs per host
      • 12TB of memory
      • 1000 VMs per host
      • 128 vCPUs per VM
      • 4TB RAM per VM
    • vSphere Replication
      • Compression of replication traffic configurable per VM
      • Isolation of vSphere Replication host traffic
    • vSphere Data Protection now includes all vSphere Data Protection Advanced functionality
      • Up to 8TB of deduped data per VDP Appliance
      • Up to 800 VMs per VDP Appliance
      • Application level backup and restore of SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint
      • Replication to other VDP Appliances and EMC Avamar
      • Data Domain support
  • Virtual SAN 6
    • All flash configurations
    • Blade enablement through certified JBOD configurations
    • Fault Domain aka “Rack Awareness”
    • Capacity planning / “What if scenarios”
    • Support for hardware-based checksumming / encryption
    • Disk serviceability (Light LED on Failure, Turn LED on/off manually etc)
    • Disk / Diskgroup maintenance mode aka evacuation
    • Virtual SAN Health Services plugin
    • Greater scale
      • 64 hosts per cluster
      • 200 VMs per host
      • 62TB max VMDK size
      • New on-disk format enables fast cloning and snapshotting
      • 32 VM snapshots
      • From 20K IOPS to 40K IOPS in hybrid configuration per host (2x)
      • 90K IOPS with All-Flash per host

As you can see a long list of features and products that have been added or improved. I can’t wait until the GA release is available. In the upcoming days I will post some more details on some of the above listed features as there is no point in flooding the blogosphere even more with similar info.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Will there be a way to migrate from the Windows Installable vCenter to the VCSA? Kinda hope for this to happen, so i can get rid of my Windows Server!

    • I can’t see why you wouldn’t be able to just point the appliance to the existing SQL database that you’re running your windows vCenter off.

    • Everytime i’ve asked for this, i’ve received the same reply. DB Schemas are not the same in VCSA and Windows versions of vCenter and Migration is not supported. It is a pity. I’m one that would happily migrate over to VCSA.

      VCSA is built to work with Postgres.

      My guess is that a migration would be possibe following this steps:
      1. Upgrade Windows vCenter to 6.0
      2. Take some hosts out of clusters
      3. Deploy VCSA in that separate hosts. Start rebuilding your original clusters in the new VCSA
      4. Export vDS config from Windows vCenter and restore it to VCSA (not sure how well this will work, vDS export / import was bugged not so long ago)
      5. Leverage cross-vCenter vMotion present in vSphere 6 to migrate VMs from original windows vcenter to VCSA.
      5a. Move hosts to VCSA clusters as resource availability permits to do so.

      There should be some other stuff to consider, but i think that would make a feasible migration path (losing all performance data, events, tasks, of course)

      My question: is VDP Advanced going to dissapear as a product itself?
      Thanks for the info Duncan, as always 🙂

      • A migration tool is being worked on, so moving from Windows to VCVA will be a lot easier in the near future, should be a matter of weeks I believe.

        VDPA no longer exists as far as I know.

      • If you have migrated your networking to local switches on the hosts connected to the old vCenter, you can simply remove the complete host cluster (no maint mode needed) and readd the hosts one by one under the new vCenter. Running VMs will not be affected. It works, did it with a couple of hundred VMs…

        • Harry

          That will simply get the hosts on the new cluster/new vCenter Server, but you will be losing everything listed below and probably more.
          -Historical performance data
          -Folders
          -Permissions
          -Custom annotations
          -Custom roles
          -DRS Settings
          -HA Settings

          • One thing that helped me a lot during migrations from Windows to VCSA was the “Inventory Snapshot” fling: https://labs.vmware.com/flings/inventorysnapshot . While far from being a complete migration tool, it did help with preserving at least part of the configuration (folders, permissions, etc).

            However, some things are simply impossible to migrate at the moment (historical performance data, for example). I’m one of the people anxiously waiting for a proper migration tool from VMWare.

            BTW – this exact idea won the VMWare fling contest in 2013. And if I recall correctly, VMWare promised to implement flings for winning suggestions 😉

      • Just did a migration from 5.1 Windows SQL to 5.5 VCA embedded. Couldn’t upgrade to 5.5 because I was using SQL 2008 (which isn’t supported in 5.5). They’ve been talking about a migration tool since 5.1, but honestly, it was cleaner to just rebuild Clusters, etc and migrate hosts/VM’s. We have around 16 hosts with 200 VM’s and so far I’ve been impressed with the VCA performance. Also, makes my SRM recovery testing a LOT easier because I’m not tied to a separate AD/SQL server.

  2. One piece of information I haven’t seen yet is when vSphere 6.0 will be available. Closest we got was a slide that seemed to imply Q1 2015. Anything you can share please? Thanks.

  5. I was hoping for an improved C# client and not more features built for Web Client only. The other things look fine, but seriously, get rid of that mess of a Web Client…

      • I did try it during the beta, and I was still not impressed by it. Still a lot slower to work with than using the C# client. Will try it again when it’s GA, but I have very very low expectations on it.

      • I have to agree with Bist, the new version feels way more responsive then ever before and with the flat menu structure it requires far less clicks, but that is just my opinion.

        • definitely a big improvement over 5.5 and that was still in 6 Beta so i have high hopes for this release. the web client wasn’t perfect but at least mac users can now also manage their environment.

          • I noticed in the 6.0 RC Beta of VCSA there was no option to download the C# client from the VC homepage like there has been for all previous releases. Not a major annoyance but it was a handy link for first time users to grab the new C# client.

        • I was wondering if they added a way for the webclient to access the ESXi host directly as they have said that the C# client is gone after this release?

  6. Disappointing some of the mid-to-higher end functionality hasn’t fallen to the lower license levels – Actually doesn’t seem to be any waterfall effect this time around. I felt it was necessary with this release to continue to compete with hyperv in SMB markets.

    • Oracle Vm server is quite nice..it has really come a long way since v 1.2..currently at 3.3.2, it kicks butt.everything is free..it’s a bit more involved in the set up of things, but it works well for something that’s 100% free, including fault tolerance, etc.
      I use both vmware and oracle virtualization products.esxi and vmserver for sparc 3.x
      I’m getting close to recommending to my company to switch to Oracle because it’s free..we have a need to start using some of the things offered in higher levels of vsphere licensing, but
      those same features,and more, are available for free in OVS..they’ve come a long way.
      best part is I can manage Sparc VMs from the x86 manager, alongside Windows/Linux servers/VMs.a very nice feature..

  7. Isn’t vSphere 6 announced in vmworld 2014? Why a 2nd announcement and still no release date?

  8. Any additional details on vMotion of MSCS VMs using pRDMs? I’ve tried googling details of this new feature and haven’t been able to find anything.

    • Same here. Very interrested in this. Will we finally be able to vMotion those tricky servers in MSCS clusters?

      • Are there any caveats/advanced configurations/specific virtual hardware versions/etc needed for this functionality? Or is it just now natively supported to vMotion VMs with SCSI bus sharing enabled, no additional work necessary? MSCS hosting is one of the gaps in my virtual hosting services today because of the inherent limitations, and I’m eager to start planning how I’ll be able to offer this service after the vSphere 6 upgrade.

  9. really cool Features, i want look the Features as soon as possible 🙂 Finally FT with more vCPUs!

  11. The thought of FT being able to run 4vCPU and up to 64 GB ram does make a good case in rethinking in possibly getting rid of MSCS for certain services.

    • Depends on why you’re using MSCS – it covers a lot more than host failure scenarios.

  12. Agree the WebClient for 6 is night and day vs 5.5 Is there list of all Maxuims yet, looking to see if total paths for hosts have been incressed. Yes I am working on getting larger Lun sizes but 6 PB of 1TB luns takes time. 🙂

  15. “Application level backup and restore of SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint” – That alone makes vSphere 6 worth the wait.

  16. All I want to hear is that the fat client is still alive and has been updated to be able to continue to fully manage my vm’s. Pretty sad that the web client was/is THAT bad isn’t it? So is it off flash then? Actually I could care less about the web client as long as the usable one stays around.

    • The C# client is still around indeed. Do note that all new functionality is and will only be available in the Web Client. Also, the usability and performance improvements with this version are big, I would definitely recommend to try out the new Web Client. I was definitely pleasantly surprised when I tried it.

  18. Hi, How many VDP appliance can we deploy with vSphere 6? 5.5 is limited to 10 instances per vCenter. We have some vCenter installation with +10 remote locations and we need more than 10 instances per vCenter. Is it a physical limitation or it’s just unsupported after 10?

  19. I’ve been reading about vVol’s and I guess I’m missing what the big deal really is. I’ve been working with customers who have been using raw storage for data drives with the Windows / Linux iSCSI initiator and that gives you a lot of that storage level control of devices that I’m seeing vVol’s promise.

    Granted, you could make a vVol for your C: or root partition, but in most cases I’ve worked on the key to the storage level control is for snapshots on separate data partitions that have been iscsi mapped direct to the SAN.

    What am I missing?

    • The key thing is that with VVOL the storage admin is managing pools of capacity and the vSphere Admin creates VMs which consume that capacity… There is no need any longer to create LUNs and present those and consume those. That is done for you based on the policy assigned. And when you need other capabilities for a VM, you simply change the policy or assign a new one instead of moving files around etc.

  20. Is there any news of when the download of the vsphere 6 is available. Because i am trilled to work with the new features, and not just in beta.

    Another question
    with vRealize Automation will there be any integration with other cloud providers like MS Azure
    Because some clients are using parts in the Azure cloud and other on premise or in our cloud
    would be great if we can manage those too, just like AWS and Cloud Air

    Regards
    Toine

  21. Will 6 allow me to finally dump Windows and use appliance for both SRM AND update manager?

  22. Will VDP still require more space then it truly allows? Ex. 8TB actually needs say… 10TB?

  25. Yah so if the vCenter client or web interface whatever, could provide the option of giving a cumulative graph of performance metrics when you select a folder of VMs, that’d be sweeeeeeet. Would love to be able to track the growth of CPU and Memory needs on a group of VMs as a whole in one swoop rather then having to look at each individual graph.

  28. Hi Duncan, do you have any information on how the new checkpointing feature of FT works compared to the old lockstep (record/replay)?
    Many thanks,

  29. Hi Duncan , With SMP-FT with atleast a support of 4vCPU , Do you think it can replace a heavy duty vPlex for Active- Active Clustering scenarios ?

    Regards

    Vicks

    • It was never intended to be a replacement for VPLEX, although Ic an see why people feel it could be. FT is about syncing VMs both from a CPU/Memory as a Disk perspective. The overhead, because we are doing all those aspects, is significant. VPLEX “only” does storage, and it does that extremely well.

      Now note that we expect latency for FT to be extremely low, whereas VPLEX can take 5ms / 10ms of latency. FT in its current SMP release was not designed to go across sites.

      • Hi Duncan ,
        I have 20 DC across globe( West Coast, Europe(Majority) , APAC) and have around 120 Remote Sites , Customer is emphasizing using just 1 centralized vCenter .. what should be the approach, What is your view on Latency and Slowness on vCenter while working ?

        Regards
        Vicks