Whats new in vSphere 5.5 ?

Whats new in vSphere 5.5?

• Hot-Pluggable SSD PCI Express (PCIe) Devices - ability to hot-add or hot-remove the solid-state disks.

• Support for Reliable Memory Technology - ESXi runs on Memory, if error occurs, it crashes and VMs too. To protect against memory errors, ESXi takes advantage of hardware vendor enable Reliable memory technology.

• Enhancements for CPU C-States.

• Storage - Support for 62TB VMDK- vSphere 5.5 increases the maximum size of a virtual machine disk file (VMDK) to 62TB (note the maximum VMFS volume size is 64TB where the max VMDK file size is 62TB).  The maximum size for a Raw Device Mapping (RDM) has also been increased to 62TB.

• 16GB E2E support.

• Expanded vGPU Support - 5.1 was limited to Nvidia - now supports Nvidia & AMD GPUs.

• Doubled Host-Level Configuration Maximums.

• 16Gb End-to-End Support – In vSphere 5.5 16Gb end-to-end FC support is now available.  Both the HBAs and array controllers can run at 16Gb as long as the FC switch between the initiator and target supports it.

• Graphics acceleration now possible on Linux Guest OS.

• vSphere App HA - works in conjunction with vSphere HA monitoring and VM monitoring to improve application up-time. can be configured to restart application service when issue is detected. Can also reset VM if Application fails to start.

• For hosts with different CPU vendors in a cluster:
• Per-Virtual-Machine CPU masking - hide or show NX/XD bit (No Execute / Execute Disable)
• VMware Enhanced vMotion compatibility - On the hardware side - Intel & AMD put functions in the CPUs that would allow them to modify the CPU ID value returned by the CPUs. Intel calls this functionality as FlexMigration. AMD - embedded this into the AMD-V virtualization extenstions. On Software side, VMware created s/w that takes advantage of this hardware functionality to create a common CPU ID baseline for all servers within the cluster. Introduced in ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update2.