by Jan Schwoebel
Today, VMware finally announces vSphere 6.5 to be GA.
As I’m writing this post, I’m installing ESXi 6.5 GA in my lab:
vSphere 6.5 Release notes
http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/vsphere/65/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-65-release-notes.html#whatsnew
What’s New in VMware vSphere 6.5
http://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/whitepaper/vsphere/vmw-white-paper-vsphr-whats-new-6-5.pdf
VM Monitoring comes with three different options. By default it is set to Disabled but you can 
enable either VM Monitoring Only or VM and Application Monitoring.
In either case, the VM uses VMware Tools to identify the state of the VM and its application and then reboot the VM if necessary.
VM Monitoring Only utilizes VMware Tools to check regularly for heartbeats and I/O activity from the VMware Tools process. Depending on the Monitoring Sensitivity setting, vSphere HA will know how often to look for heartbeats and how often the VM should reboot.
VM and Application Monitoring also utilizes VMware Tools and can monitor the VM just like the VM Monitoring Only setting but it can also monitor the application, running on the VM. In order to enable Application Monitoring the application has to support VMware Application Monitoring or use the appropriate SDK.
At a minimum it is best practice to enable VM Monitoring Only to ensure maximum availability for your most important VMs. Note, this setting can be adjusted per VM via VM Overrides in the Cluster Settings
The content catalog for this year’s VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas has just been announced.
Even tho the content catalog has been published, the schedule builder won’t be available until July 19th 2016.
Below is a list of sessions which looked very interesting and promising. There are more than 500 sessions available and below are my top sessions.
STO7650 – Software Defined Storage @ VMware Primer
INF8255 – vSphere API 101 – Harnessing the power for the everyday Admin
INF8108 – vCenter Performance Deep Dive
STO9617 – Containers & VVols – a technical deep dive on new technologies that revolutionize storage for vSphere
STO8164 – Benchmarking VAIO-Integrated Caching. Is it Really Faster? How Much, and Why?
Read More
This years voting for the Top vBlog 2016 is now open and it is your opportunity to actively support your favorite bloggers. Currently there are more than 300 blogs about VMware and virtualization out there.
If you frequently read blogs and follow bloggers on twitter, go ahead and vote for your favorite blog. As part of the voting, you will need to pick 12 of your favorite blogs out there and then rank them in an order from #1 to #12. Depending on the ranking, the blogs will get points assigned.
All details can be found on Eric Siebert’s blog.
If you are running vCenter 6.0 Update 1, you might have seen the following error.
Error occurred while processing request. Check vSphere WebClient logs for details.
