{"id":12457,"date":"2015-02-11T12:54:52","date_gmt":"2015-02-11T12:54:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.greenpages.com\/?p=4820"},"modified":"2015-02-11T12:54:52","modified_gmt":"2015-02-11T12:54:52","slug":"vsphere-6-vsan-6-other-key-announcements-from-vmware-pex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/vsphere-6-vsan-6-other-key-announcements-from-vmware-pex\/","title":{"rendered":"vSphere 6, vSAN 6 & Other Key Announcements from VMware PEX"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, there\u2019s nothing like coming back to the beautiful 4 ft. of New England snow after having been in the temperate climate of the bay area for the past week.\u00a0 Might be time to consider becoming a snow bird!\u00a0 In any case, there was a lot of news coming out of the VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) event over the course of the past week.\u00a0 The 3 major announcements were vSphere 6.0, vSAN 6.0, and the VMware\/Google partnership.\u00a0 There was also some interesting news from EMC in relation to their highly anticipated launch into the hyper-converged market and the announcement of VSPEX Blue.\u00a0 Today, I\u2019ll cover the highlights of these announcements starting with vSphere 6.0. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"vSphere<\/p>\n

vSphere 6.0<\/h2>\n

vSphere 6.0 represents one of the, if not the, biggest launches in the history of VMware<\/a>.\u00a0 The core themes of vSphere 6 are scale and elasticity.\u00a0 I won\u2019t go through every new bell and whistle in this post but will focus on the highlights which include increased scale, cloud readiness and elasticity, storage, and high availability improvements.\u00a0 First, on the scaling front, basically everything has doubled from vSphere 5.5:\u00a0 64 hosts per cluster rather than 32, 12TB of RAM per host, 480 CPUs per host, etc.\u00a0 When it comes to individual VMs, the same holds true with support for 128 vCPUs and 4TB RAM per VM.\u00a0 I would love to see a system that runs VMs of that scale!<\/p>\n

In the cloud readiness\/elasticity arena, we now have more truly federated vCenters with shared catalogs, templates, etc. between them.\u00a0 WAY better than simple Linked Mode of the past.\u00a0 We also finally have the long awaited long distance vMotion capability supporting up to 100ms of latency and breaking the old layer 2 network boundaries. However, beware of the large pipes required to really make it sing!\u00a0 Perhaps one of the most interesting new features is Instant Clone, which allows instantaneously cloning a running VM in memory.\u00a0 This is going to be a great leap forward for developers, virtual desktop environments, or anywhere else where fast cloning can be utilized.<\/p>\n

On the storage front, we saw the official introduction of Virtual Volumes (vVOL) into vSphere.\u00a0 Essentially, vVOL enables storage management at the VM rather than the LUN level which can greatly simplify management.\u00a0 This has been talked about for several years but is now finally a reality and we should see the majority of storage vendors offering supporting solutions very soon.\u00a0 We also saw that vSphere Data Protection Advanced (vDPA) is now just rolled into the vSphere product rather than requiring additional licensing.\u00a0 If you\u2019re an EMC Avamar customer, this is great news as you\u2019ll be able to integrate and replicate your vDPA backups to your physical Avamar appliances.\u00a0 If you\u2019ve been looking at vSphere replication, there are some great enhancements there as well, including network compression and fast full sync.\u00a0 In the HA area, we\u2019ve long awaited multi-vCPU(up to 4) support for Fault Tolerance. I believe we\u2019ll see some actual use of this cool new feature now that it can protect higher end VMs.<\/p>\n

vSAN 6.0 was rolled out as part of the vSphere 6.0 announcement.\u00a0 As you probably know, vSAN is the idea of taking local server storage across multiple hosts and clustering it together to create a pool of primary storage capacity without the requirement of a traditional external shared storage architecture.\u00a0 vSAN 1.0 was released a little more than a year ago and is the underlying foundation of the EVO:Rail hyper-converged solutions on the market today.\u00a0 The problem was, while it did work, vSAN 1.0 was missing several capabilities required to really bring it into the production primary storage conversation.\u00a0 Many of those missing links are now filled in with vSAN 6.0.<\/p>\n

vSAN 6.0 now supports an \u2018all flash\u2019 configuration allowing persistent data to be stored on the flash drives, whereas in 1.0 the flash was used only for caching.\u00a0 We also have a new file system format with vSAN 6.0, providing much more efficient snapshots and increased overall performance.\u00a0 Support for VMDKs up to 62TB and up to 64 vSAN nodes in a cluster bring it online with the new vSphere 6 max configs.<\/p>\n

On the HA front, with vSAN 6.0, you can now have fault domains. This basically gives you the ability to recover from a full rack failure, as well as a host failure (assuming you have a good number of hosts in your cluster).\u00a0 Finally, there is greater visibility from a health and troubleshooting perspective built into vSAN 6.0, which should allow it to find its way into more production environments.<\/p>\n

The final big announcement at the event was the partnership with Google to provide some of the Google cloud services within the vCloud Air platform.\u00a0 My colleague Tim Cook will be posting a separate segment covering the details of that partnership.<\/p>\n

So, when can you download the bits and get all of this goodness in your own environment? \u00a0Well, I don\u2019t have a hard date, but my guess is we\u2019ll see the GA code released sometime before the end of March.\u00a0 As always, feel free to reach out if you would like more information.<\/p>\n

If you’d like to speak with Chris in any more detail about these announcements, feel free to email us at socialmedia@greenpages.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

By Chris Ward, CTO<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, there’s nothing like coming back to the beautiful 4 ft. of New England snow after having been in the temperate climate of the bay area for the past week.  Might be time to consider becoming a snow bird!  In any case, there was a lot of news coming out of the VMware Partner Exchange…Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[179,181,207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","category-miscellaneous-it","category-vmware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}