VMware vSphere 6.0 Technical Overview by E-SPIN

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VMware vSphere® 6.0 introduces many enhancements to VMware vSphere Hypervisor, VMware virtual machines,
VMware vCenter Server™, virtual storage, and virtual networking.

vSphere supports several command‐line interfaces for managing your virtual infrastructure including a set of
ESXi Shell commands, PowerCLI commands, and DCLI commands for management of vCenter services.

Scalability Improvements

• VMware ESXi™ 6.0 has dramatically increased the scalability of the platform. With vSphere Hypervisor 6.0,
  clusters can scale to as many as 64 hosts, up from 32 in previous releases. With 64 hosts in a cluster,
  vSphere 6.0 can support 8,000 virtual machines in a single cluster. This enables greater consolidation ratios,
  more efficient use of VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler™ (vSphere DRS), and fewer clusters
  that must be separately managed.
• Each vSphere Hypervisor 6.0 instance can support as many as 480 logical CPUs, 12TB of RAM, and
  1,024 virtual machines. By leveraging the newest hardware advances, ESXi 6.0 enables the virtualization of
  applications that were once thought to be nonvirtualizable.

ESXi Security Enhancements

Account Management

• ESXi 6.0 enables management of local accounts on the ESXi server, using new ESXCLI commands. The ability
  to add, list, remove, and modify accounts across all hosts in a cluster can be centrally managed using a
  vCenter Server system. Previously, the account and permission management functionality for ESXi hosts was
  available only with direct host connections. Setting, removing, and listing local permissions on ESXi servers canalso be centrally managed.

Account Lockout

• There are two new settings available in ESXi Host Advanced System Settings for the management of local
  account failed login attempts and account lockout duration. These parameters affect SSH and vSphere Web
  Services connections but not DCUI and console shell access.

Password Complexity Rules

• In previous versions of ESXi, password complexity changes had to be made by hand-editing the /etc/pam.d/
  passwd file on each ESXi host. In vSphere 6.0, this has been moved to an entry in Host Advanced System
  Settings, enabling centrally managed setting changes for all hosts in a cluster.

Improved Auditability of ESXi Administrator Actions

• Prior to vSphere 6.0, actions at the vCenter Server level by a named user appeared in ESXi logs with the
  “vpxuser” username—for example, [user=vpxuser].
• In vSphere 6.0, all actions at the vCenter Server level against an ESXi server appear in the ESXi logs with the
  vCenter Server username—for example, [user=vpxuser:DOMAIN\User].
• This provides a better audit trail of actions that were run on a vCenter Server instance that conducted
  corresponding tasks on the ESXi hosts.

Flexible Lockdown Modes

• Prior to vSphere 6.0, there was one lockdown mode. Feedback from customers indicated that this lockdown
  mode was inflexible in some use cases. With vSphere 6.0, the introduction of two lockdown modes aims to
  improve that.
• The first mode is “normal lockdown mode.” The DCUI access is not stopped, and users on the “DCUI.Access” list can access DCUI.

Expanded Guest OS Support

vSphere 6.0 introduces support for the following guest operating systems (OSs):

•  Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3 Quarterly Update 3
• Asianux 4 SP4
• Solaris 11 .2
• Ubuntu 12.04.5
• Ubuntu 14.04.1
• Oracle Linux 7
• FreeBSD 9.3
• Mac OS X 10.10

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