Overall vSphere 5.5 Enhancements
·
Platform
- Virtual Machine Compatibility ESXi 5.5 (vHW 10)
- Expanded vGPU and GP-GPU Support
- Hot-Plug SSD PCIe Devices
- Support for Reliable Memory
- New Single Sign On
- OSX support for vSphere Web Client
- vSphere App HA
·
Storage
- Support 62TB VMDK
- 16GB E2E Support
- MSCS supportability enhancements
- Storage vMotion and SDRS compatibility
- VAAI UNMAP and VMFS Heap enhancements
·
Network
- Enhancements to LACP feature
- Enhanced SR-IOV
- Traffic Filtering
- QoS Tagging
- Host Level Packet Capture
- 40 Gig Support
Platform
vSphere
5.5 Maximums
- 320 pCPU
- 4TB Memory
- 16 NUMA Nodes
- 4096 vCPU
Virtual
Hardware 10
- LSI SAS Support for Solaris 11
- Enablement for new CPU Architectures
- AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Architecture) Support
- SATA controller support with both virtual disk and CDROM on controller
- MAC OSX will require AHCI controller
- Support 30 Devices per controller
vGPU and
GPU-GPU Support
- Support for additional vGPU
- AMD
- Intel
- In Automatic mode, if a GPU isn't avaialble at the destination vSphere host, software rendering is enabled
- Supports vMotion between different vGPU vendors
- Hardware 3D Render cannot vMotion to a host without a hardware GPU
Graphics
Acceleration for Linux Guests
- Linux Support
- Improved performance of graphics operations in Linux guests by leveraging GPU on ESXi Host
- Supported on Fedora 17 or later, Ubuuntu 12.04 or later, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7
- OpenGL Support
- OpenGL 2.1
- DRM kernel mode setting
- Xrandr
- Xrender
- XV
- Accelerating Entire Linux Driver Stack
- Accelerates the entire Linux drive stack and provides it as a Free Software
Hot-Pluggable PCIe SSD Devices
- Use Cases
- No downtime to Hot-Plug PCIe SSD drives (add/remove) on running ESXi host
- PCIe IO Expansion chassis to provide Hot-Plug of PCIE devices to an ESXi host
- Requirement
- Hardware and BIOS must support Hot-Plug PCIe
Support
for Reliable Memory
- Reduce memory corruptions
- Memory corruption = PSOD
- Provide greater uptime and reliability for ESXi
- How does it work
- Feature of hardware
- Some memory is more “reliable than others which is reported to ESXi for optimization
- Protecting Critical Components
- VMkernal
- User Worlds
- Init thread
- Hostd and watchdog
Enhancements
for CPU C-States
- Use deep C-States in default Balanced policy
- Saves much more power
- Can potentially increase performance by quickly entering Turbo Mode frequencies if some other core(s) in the same CPU are in deep C-State
- More aggressive setting in Low Power policy
- More eager to enter deeper C-States
- USB Auto-suspend
- Automatically put idle USB hubs in lower power state
- Unused port doesn’t draw much power
vSphere vCenter Server Features
vCenter
Single Sign On
- Improved user experience in multi domain environments
- Secure Database connectivity with Windows Authentication
vCenter
Server Appliance
- Scalability of embedded database database (vPostgres)
- Now supports more vSphere hosts/virtual machines (100 vSphere/3000 VMs)
vCenter
Database
- Official support for DB clustering technologies
vSphere
Web Client
- Increased Platform Support
- Added support for OS X
- VM Console access
- Deploy OVF Templates
- Attach Client Devices
- Enhanced Usability Experience
- Drag and Drop
- Filters
- Recent Items
vSphere
App HA
- Detect and recover from application or OS failure
- Supports most common packaged applications
- vCloud Extensibility – APIs to Ecosystem
- Supports SQL Server, Sharepoint, Apache HTTP Server, IIS
- Can be configured to restart an application service when an issue is detected
- Uses two virtual appliances the vSphere App HA and vFabric Hyperic appliances
- Agents are installed in the virtual machines that are protected
VM-VM
Anti-Affinity Rules
- Optimal workload placement
Storage
62TB VMDK
- Supported on VMFS5 and NFS
- No specific virtual hardware requirement
- Requires ESXi 5.5
- 62TB Virtual Mode RDMS also supported
- Only supported in the vSphere Web Client
16 GB E2E
Support
- Supports 16 Gb end-to-end Fiber Channel connectivity
MSCS
Enhancements
- Supports 5 node clusters
- Supports FCOE and iSCSI for SAN disk access
- Supports round-robin path policy
PDL
AutoRemove
- PDL (Permanent Device Loss)
- Occurs on failure or is incorrectly removed from host
- Based SCSI Sense Codes
- PDL means hot no longer sends I/O to these devices
- PDL Auto-Remove in 5.5
- Automatically removes a device with PDL from the host
- A PDL state on a device implies it cannot accept more IOs, but needlessly uses up one of the 256 devices per host limit
vSphere
Replication Multiple Snapshots Points-In-Time
VAAI UNMAP Improvements
- vSphere 5.5 introduced a new simpler VAAI UNMAP/Reclaim Command
- # esxcli storage vmfs unmap
- Creates temp files and uses UNMAP primitive to inform the array that these blocks may be reclaimed
- A reclaim size can now be specified in blocks rather than a percentage value
- Dead space can now be reclaimed in increments rather than all at once
VMFS Heap
Improvements
- Previous version of VMFS heap had issues when access above 30TB of open files from a single ESXi host.
- ESXi 5.0p5 and 5.1u1 introduced a larger heap size to deal with the issue
- Improved heap eviction process avoids the need for larger heap size which consumes size in vSphere 5.5
- vSphere 5.5 has a max of 256MB of heal which allows ESXi hosts to access all address space of a 64TB VMFS
vSphere
Flash Read Cache
- Hypervisor-based software defined flash storage tier solution
- Cache is a high-speed memory that can be either a reserved section of main memory or a storage device
- Supports Write-Through Cache Mode
- Improve VMs performance by leveraging local flash devices
- Ability to virtualize business critical applications
- Aggregates local flash devices to provide a clustered flash resource for VM and vSphere host consumption
- Leverages local flash devices as cache
- Integrated with vCenter, HA, DRS and vMotion
- VFFS Volume is created
- Fine-grained control via per VMDK caching
- Block Size configuration capabilities Min 4KB – Max 1024KB
- Virtual Flash Host Swap Cache
- Provides the ability to use virtual flash resource for memory swapping
- Legacy support for Swap-to-SSD
- Scale-out Storage Capability: 32 Nodes
- Requirements
- vSphere Server 5.5
- vSphere Web Client
- VM Hardware version 10
- License
- User Privileges
- Host.Config.Storage
- Host.Config.AdvancedConfig
Networking
Performance
and Scale
- Enhanced LACP
- Standards based link aggregation method
- Automatic negotiation of link aggregation between virtual and physical switches
- Support for multiple LACP Link Aggregation Groups
- 64 per Host
- 64 per vDS
- Support for various hashing algorithms – 22
- Improved LACP configuration workflow using templates
- Enhanced SR-IOV
- Single Root IO Virtualization
- Standard that allows once PCI express adapters to be presented as multiple separate logical IO devices (virtual funtions)
- Customers who want to offload IO processing to the adapters and reduce nework latency can make use of this feature
- Downside is that vMotion, FT, and HA features are not available when selected
- 40 Gig NIC support
Packet
Classification
- Traffic Filtering (ACLs)
- Helps filter traffic based on various packet header parameters
- MAC SA and DA qualifier
- System Traffic qualifier – vMotion, Management, FT
- IP qualifiers
- Equivalent to ACL feature on physical switches
- Provides Port level security
- Allows to permit and deny selected type of traffic
- DSCP Marking (QOS)
- Classify network traffic and provide QoS
- 6 bits in the IP header are for packet transmission
- 64 different traffic classes
- Important traffic can be tagged so that it doesn’t get drop in the physical network during congestion
- Helps provide end to end QoS and SLA
Visibility
and Troubleshooting
- Host-Level packet capture tool
- Visibility/Monitoring using Neflow
- Troubleshooting using SPAN/RSPAN/ERSPAN
- Host level packet capture and command set
- Allows you to capture at different levels: vnic, vswitch, ect..
