Whats New With vSphere 6.5 Update 2

VMware vSphere 6.7 has been announced by VMware recently and there are many enhancement and new features are available with this release.And now VMware released vSphere 6.5 Update 2 with some features of vSphere 6.7 .

vCenter Server 6.5 Update 2

  • A Windows vCenter Server that has custom HTTP & HTTPS ports are supported during migration to the vCenter Server Appliance.
  • You can use the TLS Configuration utility to configure SSL tunnels on port 8089.
  • you can configure SSL settings for the lightweight CIM daemon, SFCB, with the TLS Configuration utility
  • Backup and restore to Embedded Linked Mode with replication deployment topology API.
  • vMotion and cold migration of virtual machines across vCenter Server versions 6.0 Update 3 and later, also includes VMware Cloud on AWS.
  • During the GUI or CLI deployment process of the vCenter Server Appliance, you can customize the default network ports for the HTTP Reverse Proxy service. The default ports are 80 for HTTP and 443 for HTTPS.
  • Supporting Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM) with embedded PSC .

With vCenter Server 6.5 Update 2 you can use Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM) with an Embedded Platform Service Controller (PSC). This features really helps reduces the number of virtual machines to manage and removes the need for a load balancer for high availability and the maximum number of supported ELM configuration is  “10“. This feature will support only on new installations , we cannot use for upgrade or additions.

vSphere 6.5

  • Customization of default network ports for the HTTP Reverse Proxy service via the GUI or CLI during the deployment of the vCenter Server Appliance.
  • IPv6 support for the Key Management Server (KMS) of VMware vSphere Virtual Machine Encryption (VM Encryption).
  • Additional alarms for expiration of KMS certificates, missing hosts, and virtual machine keys.
  • Management of multiple namespaces compatible with the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) 1.2 specification and enhanced diagnostic log.
  • Adding tags to the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) hardware version 1.2 on ESXi using ESXCLI commands.
  • New native driver to support the Broadcom SAS 3.5 IT/IR controllers with devices including the combination of NVMe, SAS, and SATA drives.
  • LightPulse and OneConnect adapters are supported by separate default drivers. The brcmfcoe driver supports OneConnect adapters and the lpfc driver supports only LightPulse adapters. Previously, the lpfc driver supported both OneConnect and LightPulse adapters.
  • Updates to time zones in the Linux guest operating system customization: vCenter Server Linux guest operating system customization supports latest time zones.
  • Disk serviceability plug-in of the ESXi native driver for HPE Smart Array controllers, nhpsa, now works with an extended list of expander devices to enable compatibility with HPE Gen9 configurations.

Limitations

  • Cloning of virtual machines between vCenter Server 6.0 and vCenter Server 6.5 is not supported.
  • Configuration of TLS protocols on clusters with mixed ESXi 6.0 and ESXi 6.5 hosts is not supported.
  • Upgrade from vSphere 6.5 U2 to vSphere 6.7 GA is not supported yet.
  • ELM with embedded PSC will support only on new installations .

vSphere 6.5 Update 2 Download Links

VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) 6.5 U2 – Download    Release Notes

VMware vCenter Server 6.5 U2                       –  Download    Release Notes

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