Today VMware has made a big announcement of the long waited VMware vSphere 6.0, while the bits are not available for download yet, it will follow shortly. The all new vSphere 6.0 is loaded with new features, that many of you were waiting for it for years. In this post, I will cover what’s new with VMware vSphere 6.0 and to get you excited it to try it as soon the bits come out. Please note the bits out there today is only the beta, and the GA bits will follow shortly. Let’s start going through what’s excite me about the new release.

• VMotion Enhancements seams to break new ground in vSphere 6 with the availability of:
  • Cross vSwitch vMotion
  • Cross vCenter vMotion
  • vMotion L2 adjacency restrictions are lifted
  • vMotion of MSCS VMs using pRDMs
  • Long Distance vMotion – Enable vMotion to operate across distance of greater than 100ms RTTs.
  • Sound to me we are building the ground for vMotion to the Cloud!
• vSMP Fault Tolerance is finally here where vSphere 6 will allow up to 4 vCPU VMs to be protected by VMware Fault Tolerance.
• NFS v4.1 with Kerberos support. If you are an NFS shop, then I am sure you have been waiting this for a while!
• Virtual Volumes (VVol) Existing SAN/NAS systems become VM aware making the VMDK file a first class citizen in the storage world. This will  help you bring VSAN like features to your traditional storage.
• Linked Mode support for vCenter Server Appliance. This is a huge one for the vCSA fans as it was the most discussed missing feature from vCSA, so I see the vCenter Server Appliance deployment going on fire with vSphere 6.0.
• vSphere Replication is fully compatible with VMware vSphere Storage vMotion at both the source and target locations. Prior to vSphere 6.0, moving a replica at the target location required vSphere Replication to perform a full synchronization. With vSphere 6.0, migrating a replica with vSphere Storage vMotion no longer requires this. That makes it much easier to balance storage utilization with vSphere Storage vMotion and VMware vSphere Storage DRS™ while avoiding RPO violations.
• Multi-­‐Site Content Library – Provide simple and effective management for VM templates, vAPPs, ISO images and scripts for vSphere admins. I am sure customers with vRealize automation with multiple sites will appreciate this change, but the benefit will reach every customer with multiple sites as well.
• Storage IO Controls per virtual machine storage reservations to guarantee minimum service levels.
• Network IO Control per Virtual Machine and Distributed vSwitch bandwidth reservations to guarantee minimum service levels.
• vCenter Architecture has changed, where a new Platform Services Controller architecture was introduced. Where a Platform Service Controller group SSO, Licensing, & certificate authority services and can be utilize for multiple vCenter Server instances.
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• vSphere Web Client Performance and look & feel Enhancements. To be honest the moving of the Recent tasks to the bottom of the screen just like in the C# client was a  big one for me as showing in the below screenshot. I am sure many of the vSphere admins will appreciate this change.
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• vSphere Data Protection now includes all vSphere Data Protection Advanced functionality
• • Up to 8TB of deduped data per VDP Appliance
  • Up to 800 VMs per VDP Appliance
  • Application level backup and restore of SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint
  • Replication to other VDP Appliances and EMC Avamar
  • Data Domain support

• Max Config is becoming massive!
  • 64 hosts per cluster
  • 8000 VMs per cluster
  • 480 CPUs per host
  • 12TB of memory
  • 2048 VMs per host
  • 128 vCPUs per VM
  • 4TB RAM per VM

I am sure you will find a at least a feature or two you were waiting for in this release!