At VMworld 2016 the next version of vSphere has been announced by Pat Gelsinger. The new version is called VMware vSphere 6.5 and introduces a lot of new features.

As I see it VMware has introduced some long-awaited features:

• Native High Availability for the vCSA appliance
• The vSphere Client is HTML5-based
• VMFS allows for 512 devices and 2000 paths
• vMotion supports traffic encryption
• VMware Update Manager (VUM) integrated into the VCSA appliance

A couple of days after the announcement a lot of articles have been published on the internet. I have listed some of the most interesting that every VMware Engineer should read:

• vDrone by Laurens van Duijn – VMworld 2016 Announcements
• VMware by Charu Chaubal – Introducing vSphere 6.5
• VMware by Mike Foley – What’s new in vSphere 6.5: Security
• Yellow Bricks by Duncan Epping – Dynamic Resource Schedular (DRS)
• Yellow Bricks by Duncan Epping – High Availability (HA)
• Yellow Bricks by Duncan Epping – Virtual SAN (VSAN)
• Yellow Bricks by Duncan Epping – VMFS 6 / Core Storage
• Yellow Bricks by Duncan Epping – Virtual Volumes (VVOL)