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 Encryption – Notice 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.