New service: The VMware ESXi Patch Tracker

A while back I was looking for an easy way to stay up to date with VMware ESXi patches. VMware provides a lot of RSS feeds that keep you updated on new blog posts, new KB articles, security advisories etc., but ... I could not find anything that would just ping me whenever an ESXi patch was released.  The closest thing that I found was a link named "Get New Patch Alert" on the My VMware Patch Download Portal. That will refer you to the profile settings of your MyVMware account where you can manage various subscriptions including something that should keep you updated on new releases and patches of all sorts of VMware products. However, this just never worked for me, I never got a single e-mail out of this (anyone?), so I must assume that this service is not functional.

I finally decided to develop something on my own and provide that as a service to the community. So here is what I call the ...

VMware launches vSphere 6 - What's in ESXi 6.0 for free license and white box users?

The cat is out of the bag and it wears the number 6. VMware has announced its much anticipated new major version of their flagship product vSphere, and right now the virtualization blogosphere is humming with the news about vSphere 6.0.

Since this is an enterprise product most of the exciting new features are interesting for large installations using paid licenses and vCenter managed hosts: The long awaited ability ro use the Fault Tolerance (FT) feature with VMs that have more than one vCPU (SMP FT) is something that you can try out in your home lab if you have multiple hosts and use vCenter with an evaluation license, but the new support for virtual storage volumes (vVol) requires a modern SAN array with proper hardware support - nothing that you will find in the average home lab (at least not today). The ever increasing VM scalability now allows you to run VMs with 128 vCPUs and 4 TB RAM on physical hosts that can have up to 480 pCPUs and 12 TB RAM. Even in enterprise production environments it will be difficult to find setups that come even close to these numbers...

But what's in vSphere 6 that is useful for users of the free ESXi license and home labs?