vSphere 6.0 – Feature List

The amazing VMware vSphere 6.0 has just been announced and will be released in March 2015!  Michael Webster wrote a great article about the significance of vSphere 6.0 that is worth reading.  This a “brain-dump” of the impressive new features and improvements:

• Enhancement of vCenter Server architecture – SSO has evolved to the multi-service Platform Services Controller (SSO, Licencing, Certificate Authority, Certificate Store, Service Registration).
• vCenter Server Appliance – supports large (1000 hosts, 10,000 VMs) environments and Linked Mode
• Enhanced Linked Mode for vCenter – Microsoft ADAM has been replaced with a VMware “native Replication Technology” where vCSA is supported and Policies and Tags are also replicated.
• IP version 6 – Static IPv6, DHCPv6 with FQDN for 100% management of hosts and iSCSI, NFS, VMFS IPv6 support.
• Availability – Improvements to the Watchdog Remediation features of vCenter (SSO, vCenter, vCenter DB).
• Content Library – an Administrator’s multi-vCenter central repository for all VM Templates, ISO images, scripts and vApps.
• vSphere Client – is only used for direct connection to the ESXi host and for connecting to vSphere Update Manager, all other tasks must be performed with the vSphere Web Client.
• Enhanced vMotion – Cross vCenter vMotion supported and Long-Distance vMotion of up to 100ms RTT.
• vSphere Fault Tolerance supports 4 vCPUs and 64 GB RAM – with VADP support and any vDisk provisioning on different datastores.
• Increased Scalability – 64 Nodes per Cluster (incl. VSAN), 8,000 VMs per Cluster, 480 Logical CPUs per Host, 1,024 VMs per Host, 12TB RAM per Host.
• Virtual Data Center and Policy Based Management – Automates VM provisioning based on capacity and capability.  Intelligently place VMs based upon policy.  Monitor VM policy adherence with automated remediation.  Automate initial VM placement without writing complex policies.  Ongoing operational efficiencies via policy-based remediation throughout VM lifecycle.
• NFS Client version 4.1 with Kerberos – NFS benefits from Session Trunking and Multipathing, improved Security and improved Locking, Error Recovery and NFS Protocol efficiencies.
• Virtual SAN – All Flash datastore with SSD persistence. 2x more IOPS with VSAN Hybrid (up to 40K IOPS/host).  4x more IOPS with VSAN All-Flash (up to 100K IOPS/host).  64 Nodes per Cluster.  150 VMs/host (Hybrid), 200 VMs/host (All-Flash).  VSAN Snapshots and Clones.  H/W-based checksum and encryption support.  Blade architectures supported (DAS JBOD).  Rack awareness (tolerate rack failures).  Flashing LEDs to detect failed disks.
• Virtual Volumes (VVols) with Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) –  removes the need for management of LUNs and NFS volumes via enhanced VASA APIs.  A single VVol is the equivalent of a VMDK file.  Extends SDS control plane to monolithic storage.
• Storage I/O Control – Per VM reservations.
• Network I/O Control – Per VM and Distributed Switch bandwidth reservations.
• Support for FreeBSD 10.0, Asianux 4 SP3.
• Security Enhancements – Increased Flexibility of Lockdown mode, Added Smart Card Authentication to DCUI, Improved password and account management, Enhanced Auditability of ESXi admin actions, Added full certificate lifecycle management, Added certificate based guest authentication.

NOTE: This is based upon the information and features provided in the RC version of the vSphere 6.0 (Beta 2).  There may be some differences between the features of the RC and GA versions.