Yesterday VMware announced the general release of vSphere 6.0. It is not yet available for download or install but it’s exciting. There are lots of really awesome new features and improvements. I want to focus on what I consider to be the two most exciting features:
- vMotion improvements
- VVol’s
vMotion improvements:
- Long Distance vMotion – You can now live vMotion across distances of up to 100ms RTT (up from 10ms RTT) – Removing the distance factors
- Cross vSwitch and vCenter vMotion – Move virtual machines live between different virtual switches and different vCenters removing almost all boundaries on vMotion
- vMotion of MSCS VMs using pRDMs – I could not find much on this I really want to know more here.
- vMotion L2 adjacency restrictions removed – vMotion no longer requires layer 2 stretch you can now route vMotion – something I have been trying to get a RPQ on for a while. (When combined with NSX you now no longer require any spanning tree protocols, you could route everything)
What does all this mean. Better design removing past layer 2 requirements and the true ability to migrate active work loads into the cloud. Make no mistake all these changes are about flexible movement into the cloud. Combine with NSX and your workload can move anywhere. These changes have a big impact on vSphere metro clusters. I would love to see HA domains include more than one site using multiple vCenters and site replication for fail over of load. (I expect it to come next version just my personal thoughts)
VVol’s
This is the holy grail of software defined storage. Giving the storage system awareness to the individual object or virtual machine. This enabled granular level performance. It can enable flash clone/copy style backup removing the current kludgy process. I have been super excited about VVol’s for a while now. I saw a demo at VMworld 2013 done by HDS that was awesome. This object level storage solution enables awesome features like replication, deduplication, compression, storage tiering at the hard drive level, real performance metrics on the complete storage system and stack. This is really going to blow up the hyper-converged storage vendors solutions. Mark my words the first vendor to adopt and correctly market VVol’s will be huge.
Here is the problem: storage vendors have to enable and support the features. Expect some of the start up storage vendors to be supporting it right away. While larger vendors may take a while to solve the issue.
There are a ton of improvements to the new version including a solution to the lack of HA for vCenter (multiple processor FT).
Future
It is clear that VMware feels that the future is in hybrid cloud and mobility. I am sure they have lots of smart research to prove it. Compliance and configuration management continue to be my largest problem with public cloud. I think solutions like NSX start to resolve the public cloud problems. I look forward to the future with my friend VMware. If anyone from VMware ever reads this article please consider HA across vCenters with replication as an option, it would be just perfect (maybe combined with VMware VSAN to up sales).