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VMware squeezes out vSphere 6.0 release candidate – or is it vSphere 2015?

Virtzilla planning hosts with the most - 64TB of storage, 480 physical CPUs and 12TB RAM

The big no-show at VMworld San Francisco in August was a vSphere upgrade.

Virtzilla launched a vSphere beta without ever quite saying what version was being tested, and the conference passed with few mentions about the content of the new version.

While it was widely known – and occasionally stated in public that the beta was for vSphere 6.0, there hasn't been much official chatter on the matter.

Until Thursday, when Virtzilla let it be known that a release candidate of vSphere 6.0 is available for those who care to download it.

What's new? VMware's public list of enhancements says VSAN 2.0 is included, along with plenty of scalability improvements and “tangible fit-n-finish” improvements. There's a new vSphere Web Client, and not before time because the current version is hated, and a shiny new version of vCenter for Windows. And of course VVOLs will debut, as we've previously explained.

A document with more details on the release candidate intended for testers' eyes only – but sighted by The Reg - also mentions the following new inclusions in the release candidate:

  • Support for Free BSD 10.0 and Asianux 4SP3 as guests;
  • VMs will scale to 128 vCPUs and 4TB vRAM;
  • Support for hosts running 480 physical CPUs, 12TB RAM and 64TB of storage;
  • Service level management for storage I/O, with controls for each VM, and the same for Network I/O thanks to distributed vSwitch bandwidth reservations;
  • VMs with up to 4 vCPUs gain continuous availability protection under vSphere Fault Tolerance;
  • vMotion over 100ms round trips, which means vMotion over mobile broadband, a handy DR option.

What isn't mentioned is when the new software will be released.

A wager placed by The Reg's virtualisation desk would favour options suggesting an announcement of some sort at VMworld Europe from October 14th. We'd also be keen to place a small stake on the product being announced as “vSphere 2015”, as Virtzilla is keen on a new naming scheme rather than the expectation of big bang refreshes.

VMware's even snuck a mention of vSphere 2015 into the blogged announcement of the release candidate, perhaps to warm us all up. ®

Bootnote

VMware has pulled the page at http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2014/10/vsphere-6-0-rc-now-live.html that we linked to above. Your correspondent had closed the tab for the page, so could not screen capture it, and the wayback machine had not indexed the page.

For the record, links to the site - and excerpts from the page - can be found here and here, in case you think we were making it up or have taken leave of our senses.

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