VMware vSphere® 5.5 introduces many new features and enhancements to further extend the core capabilities of the vSphere platform. This paper will discuss features and capabilities of the vSphere platform, including vSphere ESXi Hypervisor™, VMware vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA), virtual machines, VMware vCenter Server™, storage networking and vSphere Big Data Extensions.
This paper is organized into the following five sections:
- vSphere ESXi Hypervisor Enhancements
- Hot-Pluggable SSD PCI Express (PCIe) Devices
- Support for Reliable Memory Technology
- Enhancements for CPU C-States
- Virtual Machine Enhancements
- Virtual Machine Compatibility with VMware ESXi™ 5.5
- Expanded vGPU Support
- Graphic Acceleration for Linux Guests
- VMware vCenter Server Enhancements
- VMware® vCenter™ Single Sign-On
- VMware vSphere Web Client
- VMware vCenter Server Appliance™
- vSphere App HA
- vSphere HA and VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler™ (vSphere DRS)
- Virtual Machine–Virtual Machine Affinity Rules Enhancements
- vSphere Big Data Extensions
- vSphere Storage Enhancements
- Support for 62TB VMDK
- MSCS Updates
- vSphere 5.1 Feature Updates
- 16GB E2E support
- PDL AutoRemove
- vSphere Replication Interoperability
- vSphere Replication Multi-Point-in-Time Snapshot Retention
- vSphere Flash Read Cache
- vSphere Networking Enhancements
- Link Aggregation Control Protocol Enhancements
- Traffic Filtering
- Quality of Service Tagging
- SR-IOV Enhancements
- Enhanced Host-Level Packet Capture
- 40GB NIC support