vSphere 6.5 -What's New with vCenter 6.5?

Yesterday (18-OCT-2016) during VMworld Barcelona 2016, vSphere 6.5 has been announced by Pat Gelsinger during the General session. vSphere 6.5 released with lot of new features that most of them were waiting for. vSphere 6.5, the latest version of its industry-leading virtualization platform. This new release of vSphere features a dramatically simplified experience, comprehensive built-in security, and a universal app platform for running any app. vSphere 6.5 makes the vCenter Server Appliance the fundamental building block of a vSphere environment. The core vSphere architecture is built around this easy to deploy and manage approach that reduces operational complexity by embedding key functionality into a single location. This article we will talk about what’s New with vCenter 6.5 in detail. vCenter 6.5 now have exclusive new feature sets added with the release of vSphere 6.5:

VMware Update Manager (VUM) is now part of the vCenter Server Appliance
vCenter Server Native High Availability
Built-in vCenter Backup & Restore
Migration from Windows vCenter to vCenter Server appliance
Improved vCenter Server Appliance Management

What’s New with vCenter 6.5 ?

VMware Update Manager (VUM) is now part of the vCenter Server Appliance

This was one of the biggest expectation from most of the customers. With early ve rsion of vSphere, we need to depend on the seperate windows server to install and manage VMware Update Manager (VUM) eventhough you uses vCenter appliance. It was one of last dependency on the Windows platform to use windows server for vCenter. With vSphere 6.5, VMware update manager is part of vCenter Server appliance. Wonder feature is it also supports the migration of existsing VUM baselines and updates to the vCenter server appliance 6.5.During the migration process the vCenter configuration, inventory, and alarm data is migrated by default.

vCenter Server native High Availability (vCenter Server Appliance only)

Most of the customers are looking to ensure the high availability of vCenter server using various ways such as enabling HA, FT, vCenter heartbeat and even with the help of Microsoft Clustering (MSCS). With the release of vSphere 6.5, It supports native high availability of vCenter server. This will be only available for vCenter server appliance and not for windows based vCenter Server. This clearly stats that high push for vCenter server appliance from the VMware.

This Native high availability solution consists of Active-passive deployment along with wintness nodes,which are clone from the existing vCenter server.
Failover will happen within the vCenter HA cluster will occur in case of host and hardware failure and also during when particular key services failure. RTO of 5 minutes is expected with the initial release of vCenter HA. We will talk more about vCenter HA once vSphere 6.5 is publicly available to download.

Built-in vCenter Backup & Restore

With vCenter 6.5, You will be able to backup and restore your vCenter server appliance with the help of built-in backup and restore option.

Enables the users to backup the vCenter server and Platform services controller (PSC) appliances directly from the VAMI or API. It also backup both VMware Update Manager and Auto Deploy running embedded with the vCenter appliance.
This backup fully supports vCenter Server Appliances with embedded and external Platform Services Controllers.
This built-in vCenter backup and restore allows you to backup vCenter and PSC using the industry-standard protocols such as SCP, HTTP(s) or FTP(S). You will be able to restore the vCenter server using the vCenter Server appliance installer ISO.

Migration from Windows vCenter to vCenter Server appliance

With the release of vSphere 6.0 update 2m, migration of windows based vCenter server 5.5 and 6.0 to vCSA is supported If you are running with windows based vCenter Server 6.0, You will be able to migrate to vCenter Server appliance using this migration tool. With vSphere 6.5, There are below improvements made on the migration tool which allows you to select the granular migration data:

Configuration
Configuration, events, and tasks
Configuration, events, tasks, and performance metrics

Improved vCenter Server Appliance Management

With vCenter server Appliance 6.5, There are lot of improved appliance management capabilities are added.

vCenter Server appliance management now exposes additional health and configurations.
User Interface now shows Network and Database statistics, disk space usage and health in addition to CPU and memory statistics.
This removes the dependency on command line for advanced statistics and troubleshooting.

I hope this post is informative for you. We have covered few of the major improvements and changes available with the vCenter 6.5 with the release of vSphere 6.5. There are lot more to cover about vSphere 6.5 in the upcoming posts. Thanks for Reading !!!. Be social and share it in social media, if you feel worth sharing it.