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With the announce of the new VMware vCloud Suite 5.5, there are some new features and also several improvements. We have already discuss about the new limits of VMware vSphere 5.5, let’s consider the other aspects.

First we have to say that, as usually, most of the new features or technologies are almost related to the Enterprise Plus edition… that means no significant changes for the SMB segment.

Editions remain the same of vSphere 5 and the comparison tables are already updated to the new version. Also the Licensing, Pricing and Packaging document has been updated.

All the news are listed in the What’s new in VMware vSphere 5.5 platform document or the Quick reference or this the official blog.

About the vCenter Server the new about the appliance with new limit of it’s embedded database (500 vSphere hosts or 5000 virtual machines) is really interesting. Unfortunately VUM still  require a Windows OS, so this could limit some deployment choices.

On the computing side some interesting features are:

  • support of Reliable Memory Technology, a CPU hardware feature through which a region of memory is reported from the hardware to vSphere ESXi Hypervisor as being more “reliable”… let’s see with servers will support this feature
  • enhancements to CPU C-States to push more on the “green” aspects and optimize power consumptions
  • improvements for business critical application support with the new setting VM Latency Sensitivity

On the storage side, there are:

  • support for VMDK up to 62 TB
  • support for FC16 and 40Gbps iSCSI SAN
  • support for hot-pluggable SSD PCIe devices
  • vSphere Flash Read Cache that enables the pooling of multiple Flash-based devices into a single consumable vSphere construct called vSphere Flash Resource, which is consumed and managed in the same way as CPU and memory are done today in vSphere

There are also new products (the second one will be sold separately):

  • vSphere App HA: a VM a applications monitoring solution (agent based) leverages VMware vFabric™ Hyperic®
  • VSAN: actually in beta. Note that is a different product compare with the VSA (see also: Comparing VMware VSA & VMware Virtual SAN)
  • NSX: non related to the vSphere suite, but it’s one of the pilar of the Software Defined Datacenter VMware’s vision

For more information see also:

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-20 and vExpert Pro. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-19. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.