VMware vSphere 5.5 - What's New?

At VMWorld in August VMware released vSphere 5.5. The following is a quick rundown of the main features and enhancements VMware have announced.

 

Single Sign-On (SSO)

 

One of the biggest issues with 5.1 was SSO; It has been well documented online and even VMware have admitted it was not great. With this in mind they have listened to the feedback from customers and re-written the code from the ground up to hopefully resolve the issues. Those with access to the beta have been reporting a huge improvement in ease of installation/upgrade using 5.5.

 

• Removed requirement for a database
• Built-in replication
• Support for one and two-way trusts

 

vSphere Web Client

 

We have a small number of additions to the web client this time around but on the whole the functionality has remained the same. We have noticed an improvement in responsiveness and this can only be a good thing if the Web Client is to eventually become the primary way to manage the vSphere infrastructure.

 

• Full client support for Mac OS X
• Drag and drop
• Recent items
• Improved UI responsiveness

 

Storage

 

One of the big changes to storage is support for 62TB VMDKs up from the previous 2TB. These are now supported with NFS of VMFS-5 datastores and hosts running ESXi 5.5. Other features such as vmotion and snapshots are supported but will take longer to complete for obvious reasons.

 

• Support for 62TB VMDK
• Microsoft Cluster Service – Support for Server 2012 and the FCoE and iSCSI protocols
• 16Gb end-to-end FC support
• VMFS heap improvements
• vSphere flash read cache

 

Networking

 

There are a lot of new network features included with 5.5 as well as LACP enhancements with over 20 different choices for load balancing, 40GB NIC support and QoS tagging. These new features will require the use of a distributed switch.

 

• LACP enhancements
• 40GB NIC support

 

Other changes

 

We have had a nice bump in functionality for the vCenter Appliance bringing it more in line with its Windows counterpart and this will certainly be of interest to those looking to save money on Microsoft licences. We also see expanded vGPU support to now include Intel and AMD GPUs.

 

• vCenter Server Appliance supports 100 hosts and 3000 VMs
• Improved power management by leveraging CPU C-States
• Expanded vGPU support

 

If you would like to know more about the changes in the VMware vSphere 5.5 platform please contact Celerity or download the VMwarePDF  here.

Barry Knox - Celerity Limited - Technical Support

 

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