Converged, Hyperconverged Infrastructure & Virtualization

Looks like VMware finally got around to have a public statement on the release of vSphere 6.5 and here are some of its main NEW features

vCenter Server Appliance

1. vCenter server appliance now has integrated Update Manager
2. vCenter server appliance now has its native High Availability
3. vCenter server appliance has better appliance management
4. vCenter server appliance now has native Backup/Restore

• HTML-5 based vSphere web client

Security

1. VM-level disk encryption capability designed to protect against unauthorized access to data. (This is done using the vSphere storage policy framework)
2. Encrypted vMotion capability
3. vSphere 6.5 adds a secure boot to the hypervisor to protect both the hypervisor and guest operating system
4. Enhanced audit-quality logging capability to provide more information about user actions like who did what, when and where if you need to investigate your environment

Host Resource management

1. Enhanced Host profiles (updated graphical editor that is part of the vSphere Web Client now has an easy-to-use search function in addition to a new ability to mark individual configuration elements as favorites for quick access, Administrators now have the means to create a hierarchy of host profiles by taking advantage of the new ability to copy settings from one profile to one or many others)
2. Auto Deploy (Easier to manage in vSphere 6.5 with the introduction of a full-featured graphical interface.  Administrators no longer need to use PowerCLI to create and manage deploy rules or custom ESXi images)
3. Proactive HA ( Proactive HA will detect hardware conditions of a host and allow you to evacuate the VMs before the issue causes an outage.  Working in conjunction with participating hardware vendors, vCenter will plug into the hardware monitoring solution to receive the health status of the monitored components such as fans, memory, and power supplies.  vSphere can then be configured to respond according to the failure)
4. vSphere HA Orchestrated Restart (vSphere 6.5 now allows creating dependency chains using VM-to-VM rules.  These dependency rules are enforced if when vSphere HA is used to restart VMs from failed hosts.  This is great for multi-tier applications that do not recover successfully unless they are restarted in a particular order.  A common example to this is a database, app, and web server)
5. Additional Restart priority levels in HA (vSphere 6.5 adds two additional restart priority levels named Highest and Lowest providing five total.  This provides even greater control when planning the recovery of virtual machines managed by vSphere HA)
6. Simplified vSphere HA Admission Control ( First major change is that the administrator simply needs to define the number of host failures to tolerate (FTT).  Once the numbers of hosts are configured, vSphere HA will automatically calculate a percentage of resources to set aside by applying the “Percentage of Cluster Resources” admission control policy.  As hosts are added or removed from the cluster, the percentage will be automatically recalculated, Additionally, the vSphere Web Client will issue a warning if vSphere HA detects a host failure would cause a reduction in VM performance based on the actual resource consumption, not only based on the configured reservations)
7. Fault Tolerance (FT)  (vSphere 6.5 FT has more integration with DRS which will help make better placement decisions by ranking the hosts based on the available network bandwidth as well as recommending which datastore to place the secondary vmdk files, FT networks can now be configured to use multiple NICs to increase the overall bandwidth available for FT logging traffic)
8. DRS Advanced options (VM Distribution, Memory Metric for Load Balancing, CPU over-commitment have their own check boxes in DRS)
9. Network-Aware DRS (DRS now considers network utilization, DRS observes the Tx and Rx rates of the connected physical uplinks and avoids placing VMs on hosts that are greater than 80% utilized. DRS will not reactively balance the hosts solely based on network utilization, rather, it will use network utilization as an additional check to determine whether the currently selected host is suitable for the VM)

These are some of the main improvements in vSphere 6.5.

All this data has been taken from

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2016/10/whats-new-in-vsphere-6-5-host-resource-management-and-operations.html

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2016/10/introducing-vsphere-6-5.html