theCUBE Live At VMworld 2014

Last month’s VMWorld show in San Francisco was notable for the lack of upgrades to VMware Inc.’s core vSphere virtualization platform. While a new beta version was announced, VMware didn’t say which version was being tested and the news barley received any media notice.

Now, though, VMware has let it be known that there’s a new release candidate of vSphere is 6.0 available, for those who wish to take a look.

According to VMware’s blog, the release candidate will come with VSAN 2.0, together with lots of scalability improvements and various performance and security enhancements. A new and improved vSphere Web Client has also been throw into the mix – and not soon enough for the legions of people who hate the current one – plus a newly updated vCenter for Windows. Also included is a new feature called Virtual Volumes (VVOLs), which allow storage arrays to do a virtualized server’s bidding and have storage pools and operations carried out in VMware virtual machine-centric ways.

Besides these, The Register reports seeing a document intended for tester’s eyes only which reveals the following new features in the vSphere 6.0 release candidate:

• Support for Free BSD 10.0 and Asianux 4SP3 as guests;

• VMs will scale to 128 vCPUs and 4TB vRAM;

• Support for hosts running 480 physical CPUs, 12TB RAM and 64TB of storage;

• Service level management for storage I/O, with controls for each VM, and the same for Network I/O thanks to distributed vSwitch bandwidth reservations;

• VMs with up to 4 vCPUs gain continuous availability protection under vSphere Fault Tolerance;

• vMotion over 100ms round trips, which means vMotion over mobile broadband, a handy DR option.

VMware hasn’t yet said when it plans to make vSphere 6.0 generally available, although the VMWorld Europe event scheduled for October 14 is worth watching.

photo credit: NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center via photopin cc