History of vCenter Server - From v4.0 to v6.7

In this post I want to review about major and critical published features in every version of vCenter Server in every released version of VMware vSphere from version4.0 to latest version of 6.7:

1.Version 4.0: It was the first publish of vCenter Server as the virtual infrastructure management system by release of vSphere 4.0 

2.Version 4.1: The great features of Storage I/O Control (SIOC) & Network I/O Control (NIOC) has been released, also the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) & Data Protection (VADP)

3.Version 5.0: Awesome VMFS5! and also supports Ultra 2TB VMFS datastore. Also included some new features like vSphere Auto Deploy, Storage DRS, Software FCoE and swap to host cache.
Also the VMware FDM was introduced, then the HA could use the Datastore Heartbeating mechanism to avoid detecting the host isolation as a host failure.

The first release of VCSA was announced in this version.

4.Version 5.1: First release vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) to separate authentication service and prevent default access of local or AD domain administrator accounts.
After this version, Core vCenter services run on separate nodes (six nodes including the VCDB & VUM servers)

Also, the support of Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), Introduce of vSphere Replication (VR) for replicating VMs over LAN/WAN and vSphere Data Protection (VDP) based on EMC Avamar technology for VM Backup & Recovery operations.

5.Version 5.5: The VSAN is introduced in this release, also published a new feature of Big Data Extension (BDE) for Hadoop clusters in the Ent/Ent+ editions. After this version HA is aware of DRS Anti-Affinity rules for restarting the virtual machines.

6.Version 6.0: Introduce Platform Service Controller (PSC) & Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM) and also Content Library & virtual volume (VVOL) features. 

7.Version 6.5: Very useful feature of vCenter HA (VCHA) that is acting as a special clustering for VCSA, and also the Native Backup and Restore Functionality are released in this version. Management interface based on HTM5 technology introduces in this release.

8.Version 6.7:  By starting this version Embedded deployment of PSC supports ELM too. (U1 let you converge the PSC deployment from external to embedded by the VCSA-Converge-CLI

Domain repoint is also another greate feature of this release by (cmsso-uti)

Per-VM EVC and vSphere Health are two other features of this version.

 

In continuous of this post, I will explain about the history of ESXi after release vSphere4.0 and also SSO domain changes in every version of after release vSphere5.1