What's new in vSphere 6?

Here is an overview of the main new VMware vSphere 6 (over 650 new features and innovations) improvements announced today:

Scalability

vSphere Clusters: Up to 64 nodes and 6000 VMs
Hosts: 480 physical CPUs, 12 TB RAM, 64 TB datastores, 1000 VMs and 32 serial ports. vGPU Nvidia support
VMs: Up to 128 vCPUs and 4 TB vRAM

vCenter Server

Platform Services Controller (PSC). The Platform Services Controller (PSC) contains common Infrastructure Services such as:
- Single Sign-On
- Licensing
- Certificate Authority
- Certificate Store
- Service (Product) Registration
- Other future services
- PSC is a central part that is used for example by vCoud Suite parts such as vCenter, vRealize Operations, etc.). For most environments (8 or less vCenter Servers) a vCenter Server with 1 embedded PSC is sufficient.
Enhanced Link Mode (ELM). Enhanced Link Mode (ELM) will support Windows and vCSA deployments and require a Platform Services Controller (PSC).
Microsoft Clustering support for vCenter Server. vCenter Server 6.0 will support the clustering of the vCenter Server in addition to the backend database.
vCenter Server Appiance (vCSA):
- ISO file that contains a guided installer
- Embedded vPostgres database. As external database Oracle is supported.
- Enhanced Linked mode support
- VDP support for backup and recovery of the vCSA
- More information can be found in this blog post, link

Storage

Storage I/O Control (SIOC). Per VM storage reservation
NFS 4.1 with Kerberos support. NFS client support for NFS 4.1
Virtual Volumes (VVols) and Storage Policy-Based Management. Enables VM-aware storage. VVOl is offered by storage vendors such as NetApp, Dell, PureStorage, EMC, Nimblestorage, IBM and Tintri
Virtual SAN (VSAN) 6 contains the following improvements:
- Scalability improvements such as:
- New On-Disk format for higher performance, efficient and scalable high performance snapshots and clones.
- All flash support
- Usability improvements in Web Client such as:
  - Storage consumption information
  - Resync status information
- Failure Domains. Allow grouping of hosts into different logical failure zones. This ensures replicas from a VM are not provisioned onto the same logical failure zone. Failure Domains are no metro/stretched clusters! Failure Domains is also known as rack awareness.
- Disks serviceability. Map the location of a magnetic or flash device from the Web Client on failures, SSD, local etc.
- VSAN is sold as separate product and not included in the license!

Availability

64 node cluster support and 6000 VMs
VMware VM Component Protection (VMCP)
vMotion Across vCenter Servers.
vMotion across virtual (distributed) switches
- No need of shared vMotion is needed
Long-Distance vMotion up to 100ms RTTs
- Benefits: Permanent migrations between data centers
- Disaster avoidance (DA)
- SRM/DA testing
- Multi-site load balancing
Fault Tolerance (FT) increase support for 1, 2 and 4 vCPU VMs
Integration with vCloud Air (replication and backup)
vSphere Replication. 5 mins increments (5.5 was 15 minutes) and 2000k replicated VMs per vCenter
App HA. Support for more business critical applications

Network

Management

vSphere Web Client enhancements such as better performance and tagging improvements. The Web Client still uses flash!

The vSphere Client C# is still available in this release. No new features are in this release. Hardware versions 9 to 11 features are read-only or unavailable in the vSphere Client C#.
Multi-Site Content Library. Stores and sync VMs, Templates, OVFs, ISOs and scripts from one central location and sync the content across other vCenter Servers (sites)
vSphere 6 has support for Hardware Version 11. Main improvements of Hardware Version 11 are:
- Maximum video memory up to 2 GB (512 MB in Hardware Version 10)
- PCI passtrough 16 devices (6 in Hardware Version 10)
- 32 serial ports (4 in in Hardware Version 10)