Huge news! vSphere 6.5 has been officially released. Those who have been in the beta program will be pleasantly surprised to find some new features have made it into the GA release!
You can read VMware’s official blog announcement here.
Some of the features that have been added are:
- vCenter Server Appliance now supports full integration of vSphere Update Manager
- vCenter Server Appliance file-based backup and recovery of vCenter configuration
- vCenter Server Appliance native high-availability
- vCenter Server Appliance migration tool – migrate a Windows vCenter Server to VCSA
- VM-level disk encryption
- Encrypted vMotion
- Secure boot support
- Proactive HA – this will put a host in “quarentine mode” and help migrate VMs off of a host when a component fails to prevent an outage
- Enhancement and streamlining of Content Library – this one is near and dear to me!
- One of the most anticipated features… full HTML5-based vSphere Client for vCenter access!
In all honesty, this release is probably one of the biggest, most feature-filled releases in a long time. Ordinarily most recent releases included increased maximum capacities from a vCPU and memory standpoint. This time around, the most significant changes are features, security, and automation enhancement. Awesome! Let it also not be missed that VMware is very much in tune with their audience and have implemented better ISO and template support to the Content Library feature 🙂
The following links from VMware should provide more detailed information on the new features – I’ll be making various posts on many new things soon!
I am a Sr. Systems Engineer by profession and am interested in all aspects of technology. I am most interested in virtualization, storage, and enterprise hardware. I am also interested in leveraging public and private cloud technologies such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and vRealize Automation/vCloud Director. When not working with technology I enjoy building high performance cars and dabbling with photography. Thanks for checking out my blog! 
