As many of you already know, VMware unveiled vSphere 6.5 during its yearly event VMworld last month in Barcelona.

vSphere 6.5 has now been released and can be download here, so you can experiencing it, test it out as you like or even implement it in order to upgrade your production environment.

 

So, let’s recap what’s new in that new version of vSphere.

At VMworld, VMware announced a lot of new interesting features an improvements in their flagship product. Let’s discover some of them in that new release.

•   Great enhancements with VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance):

A brand new and more convivial interface has arrived to install VCSA.

VCSA 6.5 gained also improved management capabilities by provided all sort of statistics showing CPU, RAM,  database, network informations and so on.

 

• Native HA for VCSA: You may be wondering what VMware actually means by Native HA. I have to admit that I got confused at the beginning but then everything got clear to me. This feature which is by the way unique to VCSA is a high availaibility solution that consists of Active, Passive, and Witness nodes that are cloned from the existing VCSA.  Failover within the vCenter HA cluster can occur when an entire node is lost (host failure for example) or when certain key services fail. Also, the vCenter HA cluster can be enabled, disabled, or destroyed at any time. A maintenance mode even exists so that it can prevent planned maintenance from causing an unwanted failover.

• vSphere Update Manager (VUM) built-in on VCSA: vSphere Update Mananger in now native with VCSA, so you won’t have to create a second VM anymore to install VUM saving you time and effort.

• Backup and Restore for VCSA: this new functionality now out-of-the-box is native and enables you to back up your VCSA and PSC (Platform Services Controller) appliances directly from the VAMI or API.

You should have noticed that VMware has done a lot of efforts so that the vCenter Applicance get improved even more in 6.5 with some unique functionalities. Now VCSA can be a better option for users than the traditional Windows-based vCenter to easily deploy vCenter.

• Virtual Hardware 13: now you can create and run your VMs with up to 6TB of RAM, and UEFI secure boot is also supported for your guest OS.

• Proactive HA:  Unlike the classic HA feature that is a reactive, “Proactive HA”  utilizes VMs and ESXi hosts health information to migrates VMs from hosts about to be degraded before a problem occur. VMware goes even further with different options that can be personalized as your needs such as “VM Restart Priorities” or “Performance degradation Warning message”.

• Cross-Cloud vMotion: this will allow live migrate workloads between VMware based clouds, which can be now be done also through AWS since both companies have teamed up recently.

• AutoDeploy has now a GUI: You can now use “AutoDeploy” with a GUI that you can launch from your vSphere Web Client rather than using PowerCLI cmdlets.

 

• Encrypted vMotion: Encrypted vMotion allows you to encrypts the data traveling over the network rather than encrypting the network itself. This is a per VM basis feature which allow more flexibility and easier implementation.                           A 256-bit random key and a 64-bit nonce, used only once for this VMware vSphere vMotion migration, are generated. The nonce is used to generate a unique counter for every packet sent over the network. This prevents replay attacks and enables the encryption of 264 128-bit blocks of data.

There are many more features in vSphere 6.5 that I’m not going to demonstrate here, but I’d  rather let you discover them by experiencing this new release.

Enjoy a new experience with vSphere 6.5!