vSphere 5.5 – what’s new – vCenter

vCenter server is a central point of management for vSphere environments and in vSphere 5.5 VMware released few enhancements:

• Single Sing On – one can use single sing on to authenticate to MSSQL server without custom user ID. Question is: why only MSSQL – where are the other DB’s ?
• vSphere Web Client – since vSphere 5.0 VMware announced that web version of the client soon become main tool to manage environment. So they did as they promised and new functionality are only available in web version of vSphere client :
  • full support for Firefox and Chrome browsers
  • Mac OS X support
  • virtual machines in in hardware version 10 can be edited only using web client
  • drag and drop function
  • filters
  • recent items
    

    Oh really 🙂 !!

• vCenter server appliance – VMware is pushing vCenter server appliance hard to the market – in my opinion is good when you don’t need advance features like High Availability or your vCenter server works as a standalone instance not connected to 3’rd party systems. In the past also was rather designated to small or medium business due to limitations. In vSphere 5.5 VMware rebuilds embedded DB so from now on vCenter server appliance maximums increased significantly:
  • 1000 vSphere hosts
  • 10000 virtual machines
• vSphere Application HA – in previous version of vSphere one can monitor virtual machine monitoring using vSphere HA (HA which checks for the presence of “heartbeats” from VMware Tools™ as well as I/O activity from the virtual machine)  or application through API and third  party application such as Symantec HA. vSphere 5.5 gives possibility to monitor and restart application process using conjunction of vSphere HA and VMware vFabric Hyperic. in fact one has to deploy two virtual appliances vSphere HA appliance and vSphere vFabric Hyperic. vFabric agent is installed on VM containing application that will be protected by vSphere HA.

vCenter server APP HA

• vSphere big data extensions – enables administrators to manage big data Hadoop cluster on  vSphere from vSphere Web client. BED is a plugin available for vSphere client and performs functions:
  • Creates, deletes, starts, stops and resizes clusters
  • Controls resource usage of Hadoop clusters
  • Specifies physical server topology information
  • Manages the Hadoop distributions available to BDE users
  • Automatically scales clusters based on available resources and in response to other workloads on thevSphere cluster