vSphere 6.5 features that are exciting to me

Well yesterday VMware announced vSphere 6.5 and VSAN 6.5  both are huge leaps forward in technology.   They address some major challenges my customers face and I wanted to share a few features that I think are awesome:

vSphere 6.5

  • High Availability in vCenter Appliance – if you wanted a reason to switch to the appliance this has to be it… for years I have asked for high availability for vCenter.   Now we have it.   I look forward to testing and blogging about failure scenarios with this new version.  This has to be my #1 ask for the platform for the last three years!  – We are not talking about VMware HA we are talking about active / standby appliances.
  • VM EncryptionNotice this is a feature of vSphere not VSAN – this is huge the hypervisor can encrypt virtual machines at rest and while being vMotioned.   This is a huge enabler for public cloud allowing you to ensure your data is secure with your encryption keys.   This is going to make a lot of compliance folks happen and enable some serious hybrid cloud.
  • Integrated Containers – Docker compatible interface for containers in vSphere allowing you to spawn stateless containers while enforcing security, compliance and monitoring using vSphere tools (NSX etc..) – this allows you to run traditional and next generation applications side by side.

VSAN 6.5

  • iSCSI support – VSAN will be able to be a iSCSI target for physical workloads – a.k.a SQL failover clustering and Oracle RAC.   This is huge VSAN can now be a iSCSI server that has easy policy based management and scaleable performance.

There are a lot more annoucements but these features are just awesome.    You can read more about vSphere 6.5 here and VSAN 6.5 here.

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