VMware vSphere 6.5 was released earlier this week, it was announced on 18th Oct 2016 at VMworld Barcelona but was officially available for download from Tuesday this week (15th Nov 2016).
Some of the new features I got to look at as part of the beta program and thought were good additions to the product were: –
- Platform Services Controller (PSC) HA – in vCenter 6.0 we could implement HA for the PSC but this required complex configuration and the use of a load balancer, with 6.5 no load balancer is required and the configuration is much simpler.
- vCenter HA – in the past we have had things such as VMware vCenter Heatbeat to provide HA of the vCenter but that was withdrawn some time again. Now we have an easy to setup vCenter HA solution.
- VMware Update Manager (VUM) now included in the vCenter Server Appliance so you no longer require a Windows Server for VUM.
- vSphere HA Orchestrated Restarts – you can now configure dependencies between VMs, e.g. an App server will not restart until a SQL server it is dependent on has been restarted.
- Additional HA Restart Priorities – up to vSphere 6.0 you could configure one of 3 restart priorities for a VM, other than disabled, (high, medium, low). Now you have 2 more (highest and lowest) making a total of 5 – similar to Site Recovery Manager (SRM).
There are loads more new features but these are a few that I wanted to pick out and will dig unto them in greater detail in later articles.