Update 1.4.2015 : added vSphere Data Protection, updated vSphere Replication, corrected host max VMs, added VVOL details

vSphere 6.0 is out since 2nd of February 2015 lets see whats new:

1. Compute

Features the new virtual hardware ‘version 11’

• 128 vCPUs (64 vCPU with 5.5)
• 4TB of RAM (NUMA aware) (1TB with 5.5)
• 32 Serial ports (4 ports with 5.5)
• xHCI 1.0 controller compatible with OS X 10.8 + xHCI driver
• Expanded support for the latest x86 chip sets, devices, and drivers. Added support for FreeBSD 10.0 and Asianux 4 SP3 guest operating systems
• NVIDIA GRID vGPU graphics acceleration technology from NVIDIA that enables a single GPU (graphics processing unit) to be shared among multiple virtual desktops. (Enterprise Plus only)

ESXi host Maximums

• 64 nodes can be in a DRS/HA cluster (32 with 5.x)
• 8000 VMs/cluster (4000 with 5.x)
• 480 CPUs (320 CPUs with 5.x)
• 12 TB of RAM (4 TB of RAM with 5.x)
• 1024 VMs per host (512 VMs with 5.x)

vMotion

• Cross vSwitch vMotion (Enterprise Plus, Enterprise, Standard)
• Cross vCenter vMotion (Enterprise Plus only)
• Long Distance vMotion (Enterprise Plus only)
• vMotion Network improvements
• No requirement for L2 adjacency
• vMotion support for Microsoft Clusters using physical RDMs

High Availability

• Support for Virtual Volumes – With Virtual Volumes a new type of storage entity is introduced in vSphere 6.0
• VM Component Protection – This allows HA to respond to a scenario where the connection to the virtual machine’s datastore is impacted temporarily or permanently
• Response for Datastore with All Paths Down
• Response for Datastore with Permanent Device Loss
• Increased scale – Cluster limit has grown from 32 to 64 hosts and to a max of 8000 VMs per cluster
• Registration of “HA Disabled” VMs on hosts after failure.

Fault Tolerance

• For Multi-Processor VMs (SMP-FT) – Fault Tolerance now brings continuous availability protection for VMs with up to 4 vCPUs in Enterprise Plus; Enterprise and Standard is 2 vCPUs.

Multi-Site Content Library

• Provides simple and effective management for VM templates, vApps, ISO images and scripts for vSphere Admins – collectively called “content” – that can be synchronized across sites and vCenter Servers. (Enterprise Plus only)

Web Client Enhancements

• Performance improvements to areas including login, home page loading, action menus, related objects and summary views. Streamlined component layout and optimized usability experience by flattening menus and navigation.

2. Storage

vSphere 6.0 adds:

• Virtual SAN 6.0 (details bellow)
• Virtual Volumes (VVOL)
  • Virtual Volumes functionality changes the storage management paradigm from managing space inside datastores to managing abstract storage objects handled by storage arrays. With Virtual Volumes, an individual virtual machine, not the datastore, becomes a unit of storage management, while storage hardware gains complete control over virtual disk content, layout, and management.
  • Virtual Volumes maps virtual disks and their derivatives, clones, snapshots, and replicas, directly to objects, called virtual volumes, on a storage system. This mapping allows vSphere to offload intensive storage operations such as snapshot, cloning, and replication to the storage system.
• NFS 4.1 client
• NFS and iSCSI IPV6 support
• Storage Based Policy Management (SPBM) now available in all vSphere editions
• SIOC IOPS Reservations
• vSphere Replication
  • end-to-end network compression (compression can be enabled).
  • isolation of replication traffic from management traffic.
  • Performance of a vSphere Replication full synchronization is improved. Reducing IO and time required for full synchronization.
  • Support for 2000 simultaneous replications per vCenter (500 for vSphere 5.5).
  • support for Storage vMotion and Storage DRS at the target location
• vSphere Data Protection
  • addition of backup agents for Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange, and SharePoint
  • replication of backup data between VDP 6.0 virtual appliances, backup data is deduplicated, possible to send backup data across a WAN for offsite retention and disaster recovery
  • VDP is leveraging Avamar deduplication backup and recovery software, VDP can also replicate backup data to an Avamar Data Store at your site or hosted by a cloud service provider.
  • automated backup verification. Jobs can be created that restore virtual machines on a scheduled basis to verify backup data integrity.

Virtual SAN 6.0

Delivers new all-flash architecture on flash devices to deliver high, predictable performance and sub-millisecond response times for some of the most demanding enterprise applications.
What’s new:

• Support for All-Flash configurations
• Fault Domains configuration (Rack Awareness) provide the ability to tolerate rack failures and power failures in addition to disk, network and host failures.
• Support for hardware encryption and checksum (See HCL)
• New on-disk format
• High performance snapshots / clones
• Snapshot depth per VM 32 (2 with 5.x)
• Scale
• Hosts per Cluster 64 (32 with 5.x)
• 40K IOPS per host for hybrid configurations (20K with 5.x)
• 90K IOPS per host for all-flash configurations
• VMs per Host 200 (100 with 5.x)
• 8000 VMs/cluster (4000 with 5.x)
• Virtual Disk size 62 TB (2 TB with 5.x)
• Default SPBM Policy
• Disk / Disk Group serviceability
• Support for direct attached storage systems to blade (See HCL)
• Virtual SAN Health Service plugin

3. Network

• SR-IOV support for 1024 Virtual Functions
• Network I/O Control (NIOC) Version 3
• Ability to reserve bandwidth at a VMNIC
• Ability to reserve bandwidth at a vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) Portgroup

VMware NSX

• Logical Switching – Reproduce the complete L2 and L3 switching functionality in a virtual environment, decoupled from underlying hardware
• NSX Gateway – L2 gateway for seamless connection to physical workloads and legacy VLANs
• Logical Routing – Routing between logical switches, providing dynamic routing within different virtual networks
• Logical Firewall – Distributed firewall, kernel enabled line rate performance, virtualization and identity aware, with activity monitoring
• Logical Load Balancer – Full featured load balancer with SSL termination
• Logical VPN – Site-to-Site & Remote Access VPN in software
• NSX API – RESTful API for integration into any cloud management platform

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Roman Macek

VMware & Virtualization SME

Roman grew up with Microsoft server administration in 2006 he switched to VMware. He focuses on designing of solutions for hybrid cloud, business continuity, high availability, disaster recovery, backup and vdi. He has background and mindset in hardware and VMware operating systems administration. He holds certifications from Microsoft, VMware and other industry vendors. VCAP5-DCD, VCAP5-DCA, VCP5, VCP5-DT, MCITP, MCTS, vExpert 2015/16.

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