Twitter:#VSVC4605
This session was a fire hose of the top vSphere 5.5 features. There’s a lot that’s new in this release, and they’ve addressed many of the vSphere 5.1 SSO headaches. So if you skipped vSphere 5.1 (like I did) for production environments, then get ready for the vSphere 5.5 train and jump on board. This is a release that you won’t want to miss. Also learn why vCloud Director will be going the way of the Windows c# vSphere client (hint, think dodo bird).
Cloud Management Offerings
- vSphere with Operations Management – new SKU in March 2013 -vSOM Enterprise + is $4245 per socket
- vCloud Suite per CPU: Enterprise Plus is $11,495
- Operations management – A large customer found 90% of VMs were over provisioned
What’s new in vSphere 5.5
Applications
- vSphere Big Data Extensions – Optimize Hadoop workloads and extend project Serengeti
- Pivotal and VMware vSphere – Building PaaS on-Prem
- Latest chip set support – Intel E5 V2, Intel Atom C2000
- OpenStack – Delivering architecture choices
Performance and Scale
- 2x in configuration maximums
- Up to 62TB VMDKs
- Low latency application configuration 31% latency improvement
- 320 pCPUs, 4TB RAM, 16 NUMA nodes, 4096 vCPUs
- 4GB ESXi minimum RAM (e.g. for labs)
vSphere App HA
- Detect and recover from application or OS failure
- Supports most common packages apps (Exchange, SQL, Oracle, SharePoint, etc.)
- vCloud Extensibility – APIs and ecosystem
- Deployed as two virtual appliances
- Tier 1 application protection at scale
vSphere Flash Read Cache
- Virtualized flash resource managed just like CPU and memory
- Per-VM hypervisor based read caching using server flash
- Compatible with vMotion, DRS and HA
- Accelerates performance for mission critical apps by up to 2x
- Enables efficient use of server flash in virtual environments
- Fully transparent to VMs
vSphere Big Data Extensions
- Elastic scaling
- Easy to use interface
- Enhanced HA/FT leveraging vSphere
- Higher cluster utilization
vSphere Replication
- Still 15 minute RPO
- Multiple point in time copies
- Multiple replication appliances per vCenter
- Support storage vMotion and storage DRS
vSphere Data Protection
- 4x greater scalability – Advanced SKU (more $$)
- Agent-based application awareness of Exchange and SQL – Advanced SKU only (extra $$)
- Direct recovery – can recover VMs without vCenter
- Restore individual VMDKs
- Can restore with a different VADP appliance
- 6x faster recovery
- 4x more storage efficient
- Managed from vSphere web client
vCenter Server 5.5
- SSO: Improved user experience. SSO no longer requires SQL database.
- vCenter Appliance supports 500 vSphere hosts and 5000 VMs
- vCenter Databases – Official support for database clustering – Oracle RAC, SQL cluster
- Added support for OS X vSphere web client
- VM console access, deploy OVF templates
- Drag and drop
Best of the Rest
- Hardware version 10
- MSCS support enhancements
- VMFS heap enhancements
- Enhanced LACP support
- Enhanced SR-IOV
- QoS tagging
- Packet capture
- 40G support
- Support “reliable memory”
- Hot-plug SSD PCie Devices
- Expanded vGPU and GP-GPU support
License SKUs
- Enterprise: Adds big data extensions and reliable memory
- Enterprise Plus: Flash read cache and App HA
vSphere 5.5 Support Lifecycle
- Normal 5 year support would end 2016 (based on vSphere 5 starting in 2011)
- Support will be extended to 2018
- Only applies to ESXi and vCenter 5.5
Reduce Complexity
- vCloud Director is GOING AWAY post vSphere 5.5. Functionality migrated to vCAC and the virtualization platform
- vCloud Automation Center – vCAC
- vCloud director will also have extended support period like vSphere 5.5
