News

VMware Publishes, Then Pulls, vSphere 6.0 Release Candidate

The company won't provide details on the disappearance of the RC.

• By Keith Ward
• 10/07/2014

The next generation of VMware's flagship hypervisor was apparently out of beta and had reached the RC stage, available on VMware's site as of Oct. 2. Then it was gone. The link to the blog entry discussing the download, http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2014/10/vsphere-6-0-rc-now-live.html, now hits a generic 404 error page.

VMware has provided no public information regarding the reason for pulling the RC from its site. A VMware spokesperson declined to provide Virtualization Review with any explanation for the disappearance of the blog entry and download.

A cached copy of the announcement through this editor's Feedly RSS reader gives full details of the RC. As shown in Figure 1, the blog post was originally written by VMware's Harish Niddagatta. He said "We are excited to announce that vSphere 6.0 is now at RC."

The blog discussed numerous upgrades to the current version of vSphere, 5.5. Among them:

• VSAN 2.0. A new on-disk format enables efficient, scalable snapshots and clones. Also includes the ability to run what-if scenarios on virtual machine (VM) storage policies and how it would affect a VSAN datastore.
• Scalability. New upper limits on clusters have been set at 64 nodes and 6,000 VMs for vCenter Windows and Appliance platforms.
• vSphere Web Client upgrades. The chief enhancements here include performance improvements in "many areas," and better usability. The Web Client has been panned by numerous admins.
• vSphere Fault Tolerance for Multi-Processor VMs (SMP-FT): Fault Tolerance has been beefed up, to protect VMs with up to four virtual CPUs (vCPUs).

Almost nothing was said about the next version of vSphere at VMworld San Francisco in August. It's possible that VMware will make a vSphere 6.0 announcement of some kind at VMworld Europe, happening in Barcelona on Oct. 14-16.

A public beta of vSphere 6.0 was released on July 1, following a limited beta 1 program. The second beta required a non-disclosure agreement, which still seems to be in force.

UPDATE: This story incorrectly stated that the vSphere 6.0 Release Candidate was pulled, along with the blog posting. The RC is still available for those in the beta program. The beta testers continue to remain under the non-disclosure agreement.