The joy of six: VMware ecstatic after finally emitting new vSphere As expected, VMware has released vSphere 6, and as anticipated the company has also released its OpenStack distribution. But it also surprised with a new version of VSAN and the release of Project Fargo. Virtzilla's also given itself a new mantra - OneCloud - to describe its ambition to manage on-premises infrastructure, what …
I just started upgrading my ESX 4.1 hosts (not ESXi) to ESXi 5.5 late last week..
ESXi 6 here I come maybe 2017. Well sooner perhaps depending if there is anything cool that interests me in 6. There has been no changes between 4.1 and 5.5 that I found compelling(by contrast there was a lot of good stuff between ESX 3.x and 4.0 for me), the only reason I am upgrading is because I didn't realize 4.1 went end of support last year. 4.1 has been so solid for me.. HP pesters me politely that it is no longer supported but they haven't yet outright refused to support me yet..
Looking at what this article says is in ESXi 6, I don't see anything that gets me excited.
Last week when I upgraded my first host in my main ESX 4.1 cluster I came across a bug where I cannot vmotion from a 5.5U2 system to a 4.1 system with a vmware distributed switch(I can go the other direction no problem), the VM loses all connectivity until it is moved back to the ESXi 5.5 host (powering the VM off and back on again doesn't help). Vmotion over standard switch is fine. So I'm expediting my upgrades so this particular bug doesn't impact me too much.
(loyal vmware customer since 1999)
Sadly I have to agree.
Whilst there are some rather cool features, from a business perspective they are of little interest to us, VMWare appears to have forgotten their core SME customers in this release, or at least in this announcement. I was hoping for some more value added components, especially since I'm about to splurge large sums of money on new licensing - Maybe there will be some news in the coming days :)
I'm in the middle of engineering a (UCS) solution that hits the 512 VMs per host as one of the first choke points. If I could go to 1024 or 2048 I could up the host RAM spec from 768 GB to 1.5 TB for ~$15K and cut my host number (8) and chassis number (2) in half for a savings of roughly $250,000.
I hate Flash as much as the next techie, but I've been using the new web client through out the beta and it is a LOT better than in any of the 5 variants. It's actually usable now and pretty fast. Besides from everything I've heard from them and elsewhere, HTML5 is on the cards (it's already used for the EVO:RAIL GUI).
The install for vCenter is also now way simpler and you can use postgres with the Windows installer so no need for SQL (well at least for the actual vCenter component).
I would have loved to dive deeper into this (also evaluating Unidesk), but we handle extremely confidential data that must provably remain in Europe and secure. The tie-up with Google pretty much wipes out our ability to deal with them as we would struggle to get that past audit :(.
You've just blown my new private cloud architecture out of the water. But in a good way!
There's a lot of good stuff in there. We didn't use FT on a particular vm in a previous project due to the lack of SMP support but that's now in, but don't know yet of the number of FT vms has been raised. lots of reading up to do. (still not a huge fan of FT though). A lot of good updates - vMotion boundaries removed is going to really help us, we're not quite up to the vast datacenters they are - 30,000 vms a day deployment is a bit out of our league. We really like the new fault Domains with associated affinity rules and policies. nor really interested in OpenStack - we're going to be using vRealize. So lots of big downloads coming up then....
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