What's new in VMWare vSphere 5.5 ESXi Server

VMWare vSphere New Improvements

VMware vSphere 5.5 introduces many new features and enhancements that further extend the core capabilities of the vSphere platform. The core vSphere ESXi Hypervisor enhancements in vSphere 5.5 include the following:

• Hot-pluggable SSD PCIe devices

• Support for Reliable Memory Technology

• Enhancements to CPU C-states Along with the core vSphere ESXi Hypervisor improvements, 

        vSphere 5.5 provides the following virtual machine–related enhancements:

• Virtual machine compatibility with VMware ESXi 5.5

• Expanded support for hardware-accelerated graphics vendor

• Graphic acceleration support for Linux guest operating systems

In addition, the following vCenter Server enhancements include:

• vCenter Single Sign-On Server security enhancements

• vSphere Web Client platform support and UI improvements

• vCenter Server Appliance configuration maximum increases

• Simplified vSphere App HA application monitoring

• vSphere DRS virtual machine–virtual machine affinity rule enhancements

• vSphere Big Data Extensions, a new feature that deploys and manages Hadoop

        clusters on vSphere from within vCenter

vSphere 5.5 also includes the following storage-related enhancements:

• Support for 62TB VMDK

• MSCS updates

• vSphere 5.1 enhancements

• 16GB E2E support

• PDL AutoRemove

• vSphere Replication interoperability and multi-point-in-time snapshot retention

vSphere 5.5 also introduces the following networking-related enhancements:

• Improved LACP capabilities

• Traffic filtering

• Quality of Service tagging

- VSAN - Allows the creation of a virtual ‘shared’ SAN through clustering of direct-attached SSD drives (High-IOPS caching) and HDDs (persistent data) – VSAN is kernel-level (no virtual appliance)

VMware NSX – Convergance of Nicira NVP network virtualization and vCloud Networking and Security;  the network virtualization is essentially an ‘overlay’ virtual network, built on top of an existing (physical) network - allowing to create and provision virtual networks in software and managed independent of underlying hardware

vSphere ESXi Hypervisor Enhancements

- Logical CPUs – doubled from 160 to 320
- NUMA nodes – doubled from 8 to 16
- virtual CPUs – doubled from 2048 to 4096
- virtual RAM – doubled from 2TB to 4TB

– Hot-Pluggable SSD PCI Express (PCIe) Devices – hot-add / hot-remove SSD devices while a vSphere host is running
– Support for Reliable Memory Technology – utilizing CPU hardware feature through which ESXi Hypervisor runs in more  “reliable” memory region
– Enhancements for CPU C-States – deep processor power state (C-state) is now also used
- New Virtual Machine ‘Hardware’ – virtual HW v 10 – LSI SAS support for Solaris 11, support for new CPUs, new  advanced host controller interface (AHCI)
- Expanded vGPU Support – support for AMD GPUs (in addition to NVIDIA), automatic (switch between SW and HW rendering),hardware and software rendering modes
- Graphic Acceleration for Linux Guests – graphic acceleration is now possible for Linux guest OSs – Ubuntu:12.04+,  Fedora:17+ RHEL7

Vmware vCenter Server Enhancements

- vCenter Single Sign-On – Simplified deployment (single deployment model), native AD support with cross-domain  authentication, completely new architecture addressing previous issues
- vSphere Web Client – full Mac OS X support, improved usability with “drag and drop”, filtered views and “recent  items” navigation
- vCenter Server Appliance – configuration maximum increases (100 hosts)
- App HA – restart an application service when an issue is detected (vFabric Hyperic and vSphere App HA virtual  appliances plus guest agents required)
- HA and DRS Affinity Rules Enhancements – vSphere HA has been enhanced to conform with virtual machine- 2-virtual  machine anti-affinity rules.
- Big Data Extensions (BDE) – web client plugin to deploy and manage Hadoop clusters on vSphere (Project Serengeti)

vSphere Storage Enhancements

- Larger virtual disks – Support for 62TB VMDK up from 2TB
- MSCS Updates – support for Windows 2012, iSCSI and FCoE for shared storage, Round-robin path policy
- 16GB E2E support – now full 16Gb end-to-end FC support (removing previous Throttle-down and switch to array  limitations)
- PDL AutoRemove – automatically removes a device from a host when it enters a “Permanent device loss” state
- vSphere Replication Interoperability – replicated virtual machines can now be moved between datastores (Storage  vMotion or Storage DRS) without incurring a penalty on the replication
- vSphere Replication Multi-Point-in-Time Snapshot Retention – redo logs are are retained and cleaned up on a  schedule according to the MPIT retention policy
- vSphere Flash Read Cache – hypervisor-level integrated read cache through pooling of multiple Flash-based devices  into a single consumable “vSphere Flash Resource” (replaces the Swap to SSD feature)

vSphere Networking Enhancements

- Link Aggregation Control Protocol Enhancements – providing 22 new hashing algorithms and increases the limit on  number of link aggregation groups (to 64)

- Traffic Filtering – Additional port security through ability to filter packets based on the various parameters of the  packet header (ACLs)

- Quality of Service Tagging – Prioritizing traffic at layer 3 by enabling users to insert tags in the IP header to increases QoS

- SR-IOV Enhancements – simplified workflow of configuring SR-IOV–enabled NICs, ability to communicate the port  group properties defined to the virtual functions

- Enhanced Host-Level Packet Capture – equivalent to the command-line tcpdump tool available on Linux (capture  traffic on VSS and VDS on Uplink, Virtual switch port, vNIC)

- 40GB NIC support – support for Mellanox ConnextX-3 VPI adapters configured in Ethernet mode

Reference Links;

https://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere5/doc/vsphere-esx-vcenter-server-55-release-notes.html 

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-Platform-Whats-New.pdf 

http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10385http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10385