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What’s new in vSphere 5.5 !!

There’s a lot that’s new in this release, and they’ve addressed many of the vSphere 5.1 SSO issues. So if you skipped vSphere 5.1 for production environments, then get ready for the vSphere 5.5.

Applications

vSphere Big Data Extensions – Optimize Hadoop workloads and extend project Serengeti
Pivotal and VMware vSphere – Building PaaS on-Premises
Latest chip set support – Intel E5 V2, Intel Atom C2000
Open Stack – Delivering architecture choices

Performance and Scale

2x in configuration maximums
Up to 62TB VMDKs
Low latency application configuration 31% latency improvement
320 pCPUs, 4TB RAM, 16 NUMA nodes, 4096 vCPUs
4GB ESXi minimum RAM (e.g. for labs)

vSphere App HA

Detect and recover from application or OS failure
Supports most common packages apps (Exchange, SQL, Oracle, SharePoint, etc.)
vCloud Extensibility – APIs and ecosystem
Deployed as two virtual appliances
Tier 1 application protection at scale

vSphere Flash Read Cache

Virtualized flash resource managed just like CPU and memory
Per-VM hypervisor based read caching using server flash
Compatible with vMotion, DRS and HA
Accelerates performance for mission critical apps by up to 2x
Enables efficient use of server flash in virtual environments
Fully transparent to VMs

vSphere Big Data Extensions

Elastic scaling
Easy to use interface
Enhanced HA/FT leveraging vSphere
Higher cluster utilization

vSphere Replication

Still 15 minute RPO
Multiple point in time copies
Multiple replication appliances per vCenter
Support storage vMotion and storage DRS

vSphere Data Protection

4x greater scalability – Advanced SKU (more $$)
Agent-based application awareness of Exchange and SQL – Advanced SKU only
Direct recovery – can recover VMs without vCenter
Restore individual VMDKs
Can restore with a different VADP appliance
6x faster recovery
4x more storage efficient
Managed from vSphere web client

vCenter Server 5.5

SSO: Improved user experience. SSO no longer requires SQL database.
vCenter Appliance supports 500 vSphere hosts and 5000 VMs
vCenter Databases – Official support for database clustering – Oracle RAC, SQL cluster
Added support for OS X vSphere web client
VM console access, deploy OVF templates

Best of the Rest