Worldwide Locations
Abstract
Discover the ways in which VMware's new vSphere 6.0 is more powerful, more manageable, more secure, and more flexible than any previous release of vSphere.
Sample
On February 2, 2015, VMware released vSphere 6.0 to the general public. During the launch, Pat Gelsinger, CEO at VMware Inc., twice stated, "It's the biggest release of vSphere ever!" To assist in meeting VMware's stated goal of "One Cloud, Any Application, Any Device," vSphere 6.0 is packed full of more than 650 technological breakthroughs. It's more powerful, more flexible, more secure, and more easily managed than ever before.
Of course I'm not going to list all 650 plus technological breakthroughs here, but I do want to focus on the five main improvements that I believe are the biggest "game changers." As you learn more about the new vSphere, I'm sure that you will create your own opinions and your own top five. In my opinion, these are the five most important improvements in vSphere 6.0.
A vSphere Web Client That You Will Want to Use
Having heard the opinions of the administrators using the 5.1 and 5.5 vSphere Web Client, many of whom were in my classes, VMware has redesigned the vSphere 6.0 client to be much more user friendly. The menus are flat, responsive, and easy to use. When you right-click, there is no delay before your options are available. The Recent Tasks are defaulted to the bottom of the screen, where they should be, so you can read across the whole screen and not scroll as much as when they are on the side. The Home button has a master list as a drop down that contains most locations that you might need. A console into a virtual machine (VM) creates a new smaller window that looks much more like that of the Windows Client and makes it easier to keep track of multiple VMs. In short, the new Web Client is so good that you will be able to stop running the Windows Client in the background, just in case, every time you open the Web Client.
Much Higher Configuration Maximums
I always tell my students that one of the main groups of facts that they should be studying for the test is configuration maximums, especially if they are higher than those of the previous version. Well, that means that "we" have some more studying to do now; because the configuration maximums that VMware announced for vSphere 6.0 have increased in just about every category regarding the design of clusters, hosts, and VMs. The following is a table showing the new configuration maximums. Noteworthy is the fact that we can now have 64 hosts in a cluster. Also, we can now have up to 128 vCPUs per VM, just in case someone wants to do that. In addition, note that we can have up to 2,048 VMs per host; provided that it's a really big host! At any rate, the idea here is not so much to "keep up with the Joneses" (whoever they might be) as to be able to always provide a VM instead of a physical server. These new configuration maximums allow VMware to, in essence, proclaim that there is nothing that a physical server can do that a VM can't do better.
More Flexible vMotion Options
vMotion, as you may know, is the capability to move the state of a running VM from one physical host to another host without user disruption. It requires the two VMs to be on the same datacenter, in the same cluster; have hosts sharing the same storage, on the same LAN, on same Layer 3, on the same switch; and on the same vCenter-if you are still using vSphere 4.0! However, each newer version of vSphere has gradually "whittled down" the requirements of vMotion, and vSphere 6.0 has removed all but the "same datacenter" requirement.