vCenter Server Appliance
In 5.1, 5.5 and 6.0 vCenter Server Appliance used SUSE, in 6.5 it has been replaced by Photon OS. This is a purpose built Linux distribution OS and you may have seen it in the context of containers, but this is a very specific purpose build OS, meaning faster boot times, more efficient operations and better performance. It’s also means security patches can be turned around much faster because there’s no reliance on third parties to create those patches, test and distribute them.
Improved Appliance Management
vCenter Appliance 6.5 brings some much needed visibility to what feels like a black box. When you now log in the appliance UI you’ll see things like CPU and network metrics, database metrics and partitions, and how full the VMDKs are. VMware say they’ll be expanding on this in the future and allow devops to export those metrics to APIs.
vCenter HA
vCenter HA is now a native vSphere solution. It’s only available for the appliance and is included in vCenter Server standard licensing. This is an active/passive solution and an availability solution, it is not a vCenter disaster recovery solution or an orchestration tool like SRM, this is simply a way to make vCenter more highly available, and is targeted towards being used in a site or datacentre.
vCenter HA is easy to install and works across different clusters, making it completely flexible and easy to manage. Functionality is built into the web UI and alerts can be configured to notify you if a failover happens etc. The advantages of vCenter HA over vSphere HA and Windows Server Failover Clustering can be seen in the table below:
VMware Update Manager
VMware Update Manager has always been a separate install, so although you could install vCenter as an appliance in the view of saving a Windows license, you still needed a Windows server for VMware Update Manager. What’s nice it that if you already have VMware Update Manager in your environment, and you upgrade to 6.5, that instance will automatically be imported into vCenter retaining all the existing configuration, making for a very clean upgrade.
Native vCenter Backup and Restore
A cool new feature is native backup and restores of both your PSC and vCenter appliances with no reliance on third party agents. This allows you can backup the entire configuration to a set of files, and in the event that you need to rebuild your appliances, you can simply restore from the backup. There’s no internal scheduler yet, but integration with APIs means you could use an external one.
Simplified GUI Installation
The vCenter Server Appliance GUI install has been much simplified. In version 6.0 it was kind of a one shot deal, if you made a mistake you’d have to start again, which was very frustrating. In version 6.5, VMware have broken the installation down into two stages; the first stage is the installation of the bare appliance where you configure a host name, IP address and provide the relevant network information. The second stage is the setup of vCenter Server itself or the PSC, which can either be embedded or external.
The advantage of this is that if you took a snapshot prior to starting stage two, then you could revert to the snapshot if you messed up.
The other nice feature that this provides is that the appliance intelligently knows if the installation was completed or not. So say for instance you hadn’t got to stage two, you could later log into the web client, and the installer would realise this and walk you through the rest of the install.
The installer now also fully supports Windows, Linux and MAC OS X, so a client integration plugin is no longer required to launch the installer anymore. Furthermore the vCenter install can now be scripted.
The other nice feature that this provides is that the appliance intelligently knows if the installation was completed or not. So say for instance you hadn’t got to stage two, you could later log into the web client, and the installer would realise this and walk you through the rest of the install.
The installer now also fully supports Windows, Linux and MAC OS X, so a client integration plugin is no longer required to launch the installer anymore. Furthermore the vCenter install can now be scripted.
vSphere Management Clients
Currently there are five different ways to manage your vSphere environments, this is way too many.
In the future VMware hope to condense these down into a smaller number of clients. In the meantime VMware has been working hard to improve the vSphere Client and the benefits are:
-Clean, modern UI built on VMware’s new Clarity UI standards
-No Browser plugins to install/manage
-Integrated into vCenter Server 6.5
-Fully supports Enhanced Link Mode
-Better performance
-Clean, modern UI built on VMware’s new Clarity UI standards
-No Browser plugins to install/manage
-Integrated into vCenter Server 6.5
-Fully supports Enhanced Link Mode
-Better performance
More information can be found on VMware’s website.
This blogpost is based on a recent podcast by #vBrownBag. Credit to VMware for the images.
This blogpost is based on a recent podcast by #vBrownBag. Credit to VMware for the images.