What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.5

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This post is to bring the short summarized view of What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.5. This list is based out of the What’s New in vSphere 5.5 Platform–Quick Reference. You can see the categorized view of vSphere ESXi hypervisor Enhancements, Virtual Machine Enhancements, VMware vCenter Server Enhancements,Availability Enhancements ,vSphere storage Enhancements,vSphere Networking Enhancements,vSphere PowerCLI Enhancements. Release of vSphere 5.5 is announced in VMWorld 2013.

New Configuration Maximums

  •  Supports 4 TB of Memory (was 2TB in vSphere 5.1)
  • 16 NUMA Nodes per host in vSphere 5.(8 NUma Nodes in vSphere 5.1)
  • 4096 Maximum vCPUs per host  ( maximum 2048 vCPUs in vSphere 5.1)
  • Supports 320 Physical CPUs per ESXi host  (was 160 PCPU in vSphere 5.1)

vSphere ESXi Hypervisor Enhancements

  • Hot-Pluggable SSD PCI Express (PCIe) Devices (Hot Add/Remove SSD Devices without any downtime)
  • Support for Reliable Memory Technology (Guards ESXi hypervisor against Memory Errors)
  • Enhancements for CPU C-States ( Improved Power saving and Performance)
  • Native Drivers for ESXi Hypervisor Enhancements

Virtual Machine Enhancements

  • Virtual Machine Compatibility with VMware ESXi 5.5(HW Version 10)
  • LSI SAS support for Oracle Solaris 11
  • Enablement for new CPU architectures
  • New advanced SATA host controller interface (AHCI) (4 Controllers, 30 Devices per controller; 120 Total)
  • Graphic Acceleration for Linux Guests (Ubuntu 12.04 , Fedora 17 , RHEL 7)
  • Expanded vGPU Support (Include both Intel- and AMD-based GPUs along with NVIDIA) 
  • Render modes: automatic, hardware, software

With Automatic Mode: Virtual Machines still can leverage vMware vMotion technology even across heterogeneous mix of VGPU vendors without any downtime to the virtual machines

Software Mode:  Software Mode will be automatically enabled if automatic mode is enabled and a GPU is not available at the destination ESXi host
With Hardware Mode: If GPU does not exist at the destination ESXi host, vMware vMotion instance will not be attempted. Below are operating System whihc supports for VGPU:

VMware vCenter Server Enhancements

VMware vSphere Web Client
  • Full client support for Mac OS X
  • Drag and drop
  • Filters ( to help refine search criteria and make it easy to find objects)
  • Recent Items ( makes it easier to navigate between commonly used views)

VMware vCenter Server Appliance

  • Supports up to 100 hosts or 3,000 VM (with vSphere 5.1, It was 5 Hosts and 50 Virtual Machines)

VMware vCenter Single Sign-on

  • Updated with a multi master architecture supporting a single deployment model
  • Built in replication
  • Removed database requirement (There is no longer an external database required for the SSO server)
  • Support for SSL Certificate Automation Tool
  • Diagnostic tool

VSphere Big Data Extensions

  • Plugin to deploy and manage Hadoop clusters

Availability Enhancements

  • vSphere App HA (Restart pre-defined application service on issue)
  • vSphere Replication Interop – Storage vMotion/SDRS vSphere Replication Multi-Point-in-Time Snapshot Retention

vSphere HA and vSphere DRS

  •  VM antiaffinity rules now recognized as part of HA Failover

vSphere Storage Enhancements

  • Support for 62 TB VMDK (Maximum Size of VMFS volume is 64 TB)
  • RDM also support Maximum Size of 62 TB
  • 16Gb E2E support (Both the HBAs and array controllers can run at 16Gb)
  • PDL AutoRemove (Automatically removes a device from a host when it enters a Permanent Device Loss (PDL) state)
  • vSphere Flash Read Cache (It enables the pooling of multiple flash-based devices into a single consumable vSphere construct called a vSphere Flash Resource, which can be used to enhance virtual machine performance by accelerating read-intensive workloads.)
  • VAAI UNMAP Improvements (new “esxcli storage vmfs unmap” command with the ability to specify the reclaim size in blocks)
  • VMFS Heap Improvements (Maximum of 256MB of heap is needed to enable vSphere hosts to access the entire address space of a 64TB VMFS)
MSCS Updates
  • Microsoft Windows 2012
  • Round-robin path policy for shared storage
  • iSCSI protocol for shared storage 
  • Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol for shared storage

vSphere Networking Enhancements

  • 40GB NIC support (functionality is limited to the Mellanox ConnectX-3 VPI adapters configured in Ethernet mode)
  • Link Aggregation Control Protocol Enhancements (supports 22 new hashing algorithms, support for up to 64 Link Aggregation Groups (LAGs) )
  • Traffic Filtering ( packet classification and filtering based on MAC SA and DA qualifiers, traffic type qualifiers (i.e. vMotion, Management, FT), and IP qualifiers (i.e. protocol, IP SA, IP DA, and port number).
  • SR-IOV Enhancements
  • Enhanced Host-Level Packet Capture (an enhanced host-level packet capture tool similar to tcpdump tool available on the Linux platform)
  • Quality of Service Tagging (Support for Differentiated Service Code Point (DCSP) marking)