What's New vSphere 5.5 in a Summary

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With the announcement from VMWorld 2013, vSphere 5.5 was launched.  In case you have forgotten or need to review a summary what vSphere 4.1 and 5.0 and 5.1 has, you can refer to my previous post here and here.

VMware has also release a whitepaper on the platform here.  There is also a blog post from VMware as well with a quick reference guide and a summary post here.

I will not mention again what is already mentioned above in post referred to.  But I will just briefly goes through some of the things I find it worth mentioning.

SSO installation and setup is now a breeze of the past.  It has been greatly improved.  I will do my best to do a video on upgrading and as well as installing for new field once I gather some time and you can see my current video on installing SSO in vSphere 5.1 to do that comparison.

Web Client now support MAC OS X for virtual machine console viewing.  I needed this as I am always on a Mac.

For environment that want hassle free setup of vCenter and saving from Microsoft Server license, now you can with the new VCSA.  It can now support up to 500 hosts and 5000 VMs with embedded database.

The biggest look forward was the VDMK file size which I am looking for.  This removed the requirement of multiple 2TB-512MB limitation since VMs are now getting bigger and this seems to be a show stopper.

The support for FCoE and iSCSI for MSCS really took a big leap.  With this supported, now even SME with IP storage can leverage on MSCS instead of relying just on FC.

Also High Availability (HA) is now DRS Anti-Affinity aware!  For those doing Metro-Cluster will love this since no longer you need to wait for the next DRS invocation.

There is a new feature adding on to the existing High Availability, that is Application HA (AppHA).  However this is still a 1.0 release so the number of supported applications do have a limitation and believe there will be extending this list either via the future release or via future updates.  Whichever the case here is the list of supported applications which AppHA support in this release which can also be found in the user guide.
  • Apache Tomcat 6.0
  • Apache Tomcat 7.0
  • Apache Web Server (httpd)
  • IIS 6.x
  • IIS 7.x
  • IIS 8.x
  • SQL Server 2005
  • SQL Server 2008
  • SQL server 2008 R2
  • SQL Server 2012
  • SharePoint 2007
  • SharePoint 2010
  • vFabric tc Server 6.0
  • vFabric tc Server 7.0
Here is a summary of for vCPU between vSphere 5.0 and 5.1.  Also the Free ESXi Hypervisor has no more hard limit of 32GB physical memory as stated here.

Number of vCPU per VM
vSphere 5.5 and Prior Edition
vCPU Entitlement
vRAM Entitlement
Free ESXi
 8
Unlimited
Essential
Unlimited
(8 for vSphere 5.1)
Unlimited
Essential Plus
Unlimited
(8 for vSphere 5.1)
Unlimited
Standard
Unlimited 
(8 for vSphere 5.1)
Unlimited
Standard with Operation
Management Suite Advanced
Unlimited
(8 for vSphere 5.1)
Unlimited
Enterprise
Unlimited
(32 for vSphere 5.1)
(8 for vSphere 5.0)
Unlimited
Enterprise Plus
Unlimited
(64 for vSphere 5.1)
(32 for vSphere 5.0)
Unlimited
Note:  For the table stating "Unlimited", please check the configuration maximum guide for the exact maximum.

There is not physical cores per processor limit.

I will update this post when more information is release.  Do check this back.
Update 14th Jul 2014
Refer to this KB on how to license your vSphere 5.x.

 Update 28th Jan 2014
Added Configuration Maximum guide with a note on the table regarding "Unlimited".


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