Difference Between

vSphere 5.5 vs 6
Agenda
Bigger, Faster, Stronger
vSphere 6 Management
Storage Redefined
Advanced Features and Improvements
Questions/Answers
Scalability Improvements

vSphere 5.5 vSphere 6

32 Host per Cluster 64 Hosts per Cluster 2x
4000 VMs per Cluster 8000 VMs per Cluster 2x
320 CPUs per Host 480 CPUs per Host 1.5x
4 TB Ram per Host 12 TB Ram per Host 3x
512 VMs per Host 1024 VMs per Host 2x
64 vCPU per VM 128 vCPU per VM 2x
1 TB vRAM per VM 4 TB vRAM per VM 4x

Why would any VM need that many resources?

VMware promotes its readiness for Big Data (Hadoop, Cloudera, SAP HANA, etc)
vSphere Management

vCenter
vCenter on Windows vs vCenter Appliance
vCenter 6

Metric Windows Appliance

Host per vCenter 1,000 1,000
Powered-On VMs 10,000 10,000
Hosts per Cluster 64 64
VMs per Cluster 6,000 6,000
Linked Mode
vSphere Client
How many STILL use the vSphere Windows Client by Default?
STOP IT!!

Capabilities vSphere Client Web Client

vSphere Management
ESXi Patching via VUM X
Supports Hardware v 8-11 X
New Features X

FYI: The Web Client has increased its speed since 5.5
Login Time = 13x Faster
Right Click Menus = 4x Faster
End to End Tasks = 50% Faster
Performance Charts = 2x Faster
Features only Available to Web Client

Manage vCenter SSO Edit VM Settings on new vHW Granular Detail on Health

vMotion Anywhere
Customizable UI

Inventory Tagging More FT and Clustering Options

Integration with vRealize

VDP Integration

VSAN Management

Integrated vSphere Replication

More options for Health Check and Export/Import Configs
Storage Redefined
Virtual SAN 6 (VSAN)

Virtual SAN (VSAN): Local Storage Integrated into the hypervisor (not a VSA). Allows you to use off the shelf drives and
cluster them in a highly available, high performance, shared storage platform for your VMs.
Virtual Volumes (vVols)
How does vSphere 6 Storage with vVols work?
ESXi manages the array through VASA 2.0 (vSphere APIs for storage awareness) APIs and the array is logically partitioned into
containers, called Storage Containers. Virtual machine disks, called Virtual Volumes, are stored natively on the
Storage Containers. I/O from ESXi to the array is addressed through an access point called Protocol Endpoint (PE).
Data services are then offloaded to the array. The capacity, performance, availability, protection and security for an
individual virtual machine on the underlying storage platform is managed through a policy on the vSphere level.
 Advanced Features and Improvements
Cross vSwitch vMotion: Migrate VMs across different vSwitches, it is not dependent on previous network configs or
different vDS (Distributed Switches)

Cross vCenter vMotion: Not only can you vMotion to a new vCenter, you can change the Host, Storage, and its Network .
You can also migrate from VCSA to Windows vCenter

Long Distance vMotion: Similarly to Cross vCenter vMotion, vCenter 6 allows you to vMotion across geographical distances.
Perfect for DR, Maintenance, and Load Balancing. (Also requires 250 Mbps Bandwidth and <100ms latency)

Third Party Distributed Switches: An enhancement of their SDN offering, more vendors and more features available.
 vSphere Data Protection (vDP)

VMware has taken all the features of VDP Advanced & consolidated them into the same product

vDP is now included with vSphere Essentials Plus and Higher

Fault Tolerance: Fault Tolerance is an Feature FT 5.5 FT 6.0
awesome feature for workloads that need vCPUs 1 4
guaranteed uptime, but in pervious versions
Virtual Disks EZT Any
you were limited on the VMs vhardware.
Workloads with greater resources can now Hot Config FT X
take advantage of FT. H/W Virtualization X
Backup (Snapshot) X
Paravirtual Devices X
Storage Redundancy X
VSAN/vVols X X
HA
DRS Partial Partial
DPM
SRM
VDS
Storage DRS X X
VCD X X
vSphere Replication X X
Misc items:
High Availability Improvements
vSphere Replication
Improved Security
Better Microsoft Clustering
And a lot more
Q&A??

Thank you for Attending

The vVol-architecture consists of the following components:

VASA Provider
The VASA Provider is a software component that is developed by storage array vendors and that exposes the storage
services which a vVols array can provide. It also understands VASA APIs for operations such as the creation of virtual volume
files. It can be thought of as the control plane element of Vvols.

Protocol Endpoints (PE)

Protocol Endpoints are the channel through which data is sent between the virtual machines and the arrays. They can be
thought of as the data plane component of Vvols. PEs are configured as a part of the physical storage fabric, and are
accessed by standard storage protocols, such as iSCSI, NFS v3, and FC.

Storage Container
A storage container is a logical construct for grouping Virtual Volumes. It is set up by the storage admin, and the capacity of
the container can be defined. As mentioned before, vVols allows you to separate capacity management from policy
management. Containers provide the ability to isolate or partition storage according to whatever need or requirement you
may have.
The main thing to note about storage containers is, a storage container maps to a vSphere Datastore. The concept of
datastores is deeply embedded within vSphere and all associated products, and they are used for various purposes, such
as administrative access control. Vvols provides a corresponding object so that you can continue to logically manage storage
as you do with traditional arrays.

Storage Policy-Based Management framework (SPBM)

Instead of being based on static, per-LUN assignment, storage policies with vVols are managed through the Storage
Policy-Based Management framework of vSphere. This framework uses the VASA APIs to query the storage array about
what data services it offers, and then exposes them to vSphere as capabilities. These capabilities can then be grouped
together into rules and rulesets, which are then assigned to VMs when they get deployed. When configuring the array, the
storage admin can choose which capabilities to expose or not expose to vSphere.