Guys , Today VMware announced vSphere 6.5, here is the new feature list and enhancements…

Features which really excites me are as below:

Scale Enhancements – New configuration maximums to support even the largest app environments.

VMware vCenter Server® Appliance – The single control center and core building block for vSphere , VMware wants going forward every should use vCenter appliance and lots of efforts have been made to make it possible , Now Appliance support…

• Native High Availability

  • Now vCenter Appliance  has High Availability which is a native HA solution built right into the appliance. Using an Active/Passive/Witness architecture, vCenter is no longer a single point of failure and can provide a 5-minute RTO. This HA capability is available out of the box and has no dependency on shared storage, RDMs, or external databases.

• Vmware update Manager is now part of appliance.
  • integration of VMware Update Manager into the vCenter Server Appliance , so more separate windows based deployment required , Zero setup; embedded DB and Leverages VCSA HA and backup
• Improved Appliance Management

  • Now user interface shows Network and Database statistics, disk space, and health in addition to CPU and memory statistics which reduces the reliance on using a command line interface for simple monitoring and operational tasks.

• Native Backup and Restore
  • Appliance only , Now support simplified backup and restore with a new native file-based backup solution to external storage using HTTP , FTP or SCP protocols  and Restore the vCenter Server configuration to a fresh appliance.

NOTE – These new features are only available in the vCenter Server Appliance.

vSphere Client (HTML5 Web Client)

• Clean, modern UI built on VMware’s new Clarity UI standards, No browser plugins to install/manage , Integrated into vCenter Server for 6.5 and Fully supports Enhanced Linked Mode.

vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC)

• VIC extends vSphere capabilities to run container workloads and sits on top of vCenter, and integrates with the rest of the Vmware stack like NSX and vSAN.
• VIC contains three parts, VIC engine which delivers virtual container host that provides native docker endpoint, developer can continue to use the familiar docker commands, the fact these docker containers are running in a virtual infrastructure is transparent to them, except for the benefit that their infrastructure resources like compute, storage can be expanded much more easily.
• The second component is registry which provides enterprise private registry capability to give IT control over their intellectual property. This is an optional component, you can of course use docker or other registry of your choices.
• The third component is container management portal which provide GUI, API and CLI interfaces to provision, manage and monitor containers.

Simplified HA Admission Control

• Simplified configuration workflow
• Additional Restart Priorities added – Highest , High , medium , low and Lowest

Proactive HA 

• Detect hardware conditions of host components by receiving alerts from hardware vendor monitoring solution
  • Dell Openmanage
  • HP Insight Manager
  • Cisco UCS Manager
• Notifications of host impacted, its current state, error causes, severity and physical remediation steps and vMotion VMs from partially degraded hosts to healthy hosts. ( this is configurable)
• i think this is really awesome if configured properly.

Network-Aware DRS

• Adds network bandwidth considerations by calculating host network saturation (Tx & Rx of connected physical uplinks)

Currently i am going through detailed feature list and will be sharing more soon , till that time Happy learning 🙂