With the new VMware vSphere 6.0 there are several improvement in the availability related features. Although the vSphere HA apparently has not changed so much (of course now support a bigger cluster with 64 nodes), there several aspects that have been improved or changed:
Reading Time: < 1 minuteInteresting European IT events:
Reading Time: 4 minutesThe new VMware vSphere 6.0, recently announced, increase all configuration maximums to new limits (compared to the 5.5 and previous versions).
Maybe we can say with no limit, or at least, to be serious, with really huge numbers compared to the actual needs and the existing compunting power. Those new limits are both for scalability aspect, but also to fit with possible performance requirements, considering that a bigger number of business critical applications are going in the virtual environment.
Reading Time: 14 minutesWith the new VMware vSphere 6.0 there are a lot of changes, and some of them are in the new vCenter architecture both for the Windows installable version and the virtual appliance (vCSA) version. For this reason the design aspects and the deployment scenarios are changed from the previous version (see VMware vCenter 5.5 design).
Windows vCenter installation experience has been enhanced with additional capabilities including custom ports, custom paths, uninstall and error messaging improvements and vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) now has a guided installer. Furthermore, all upgrade paths from Windows vCenter 5.0 and up are now supported.
Note that VMware has also recently released a new document: VMware vCenter Server 6.0 Deployment Guide.
Some considerations remain still the same (like the DBMS placement, or choosing between a physical or virtual deployment, or finding a good high availability architecture), but other are different, starting from the different vCenter components that now have been simplified with a logical separation between management and core&security roles.
Reading Time: 4 minutesPernixData FVP is a Flash Hypervisor software that aggregates server flash across a virtualized data center, creating a scale-out data tier for accelerating reads and writes to primary storage in a simple and powerful way. Was one of first (probably the first) to implement a fault-tolerant write back acceleration.
Stating from version 2.0 they add both memory support (instead or with flash) and NFS support (previously they where only block level).
Now the latest version of PernixData FVP software (version 2.5) will add following new features:
Reading Time: 8 minutesAfter the new Virtual Volumes, the most “spoilered” features of the new VMware vSphere 6.0 was probably the new vMotion that allow VMs to move across boundaries of vCenter Server, Datacenter Objects, Folder Objects and also virtual switches and geographical area.
VMware vMotion was probably the first important virtualization related features that make important VMware (and its product) but, much important, that make relevant the virtualization approach: having VM mobility means handle planned downtime and also workload balancing.
Now VMware reinvent vMotion to become more agile, more cloud oriented: breaking the boundaries and going outside the usual limit make possible have VM mobility across clouds. Note that actually it’s not (yet) possible use this feature to live move to or from a vCloud Air service… but of course this is the first step to do this in the future.
Reading Time: 8 minutesIn previous versions of vSphere, the vCenter Server was not suitable to provide directly cloud based functions: vCloud Director was the way to build a Software Defined DataCenter (SDDC) at the top of vSphere and provide more functions and concepts that were not available in vCenter. But, during the VMworld 2013, VMware introduced a new product strategy and direction for vCloud Director (vCD): VMware would like to move forward with a plan to converge vCD functionality into the vSphere and vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) product lines or (as another direction) in the virtualization platform (that means inside vCenter Server)
The new vCenter Server 6.0 goes in the second direction that does not exclude the first one (to be more precise, bring some functions in the lower level will help to add more at the top level with tools like vCAC).
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