VMware announced vSphere 6.5 at VMworld Europe.   I don’t want to go through everything that’s new, but I do want to go over the vSphere 6.5 new features I think are the coolest that I can’t wait for.

vSphere 6.5 New Features – Me likey!

Here are the vSphere 6.5 new features I specifically wanted to highlight that I think are going to be the most useful to my customers.

vCenter 6.5 New Features

• The vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) FINALLY has an integrated VMware Update Manager.  No more Windows machine for VUM!  Even less excuses for using the Windows version!  Speaking of which…
• Native VCSA high availability!  In vCenter 6.0, the only way to make vCenter truly highly available was to use Windows Clustering.  Not anymore!  Now the VCSA has its own ability.  VCSA NOW AND FOREVER!
• File-based backup and recovery for VCSA, so it’s even easier to make any kind of recovery you may need.
• HTML5 based vSphere Web Client!  Take that, Adobe Flash!  No more Flash vulnerabilities and issues to worry about!
• Fully supported standalone HTML5 based thick client!

Clustering New Features

• HA Orchestrated Restarts – Now you can enforce a chain of VMs to ensure VM interdependency for multi-tiered applications!
• Proactive HA – Now you can integrate HA with hardware vendor monitoring tools to move VMs off hosts that have hardware problems before they actually result in an ESXi host crashing.  How cool is that?
• DRS now takes network bandwidth into account, to ensure your workloads can be dynamically moved between hosts to ensure the best network performance.

Security New Features

I have numerous customers who for legal and other reasons are extremely security conscious.  These may be of particular interest:

• vMotion traffic encryption – One of the reasons I recommend segregated isolated non-routable VLANs generally for vMotion traffic is due to the fact that vMotion traffic is unencrypted.  Think about the implications of that.  The running contents of RAM for a VM is copied in the clear over a network during a vMotion!  If that’s a VM processing let’s say credit card transactions or personally identifiable information like a Social Security number, that’s pretty scary!  Now consider the boundaries of vMotions have been lifted to the point you can conceivably vMotion a VM across datacenters.  Now, for the first time, you can encrypt this traffic.
• VM disk encryption – If your shared storage solution can’t encrypt your data at rest, you used to be out of luck for doing whole VM encryption.  Not anymore!  Now it can be done at the VM level!
• Better logging now to provide better auditing capability to see who did what within the environment.

There’s a whole lot more in this release.  I’m sure I’ll post more about these and other cool features and capabilities soon!

Before you ask, the tentative release date for vSphere 6.5 is Q4 2016.