The vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 is the first VMware Appliance to run on Photon OS, it is a Linux OS optimized for virtualization which will become in near future  standard for all VMware virtual appliances. Photon OS provide many benefits to the performance of the vCenter Server Appliance, which includes about 3x performance gain over its Windows counterpart and significantly reduces boot and restart times. This also means no more dependency on 3^rd party for OS patching and should greatly reduces the amount of time it takes VMware to deliver security patches and updates to the vCenter Server Appliance.

VCSA – main features:

• Native High Availability
• VMware Update Manager
• Improved Appliance Management
• Native Backup / Restore

In vSphere 6.0 we saw performance and scalability parity for the vCenter Server Appliance when compared to it’s Windows-based counterpart. With vSphere 6.5 we now see feature parity and even new features that are exclusive to the vCenter Server Appliance. Let’s take a quick look at each of these new features before addressing them in more details later:

Let’s start with vCenter High Availability which is a native HA solution built right into the appliance. Using an Active/Passive/Witness architecture, vCenter is no longer a single point of failure and can provide a 5-minute RTO. This HA capability is available out of the box and has no dependency on shared storage, RDMs or external databases.

Next, we have the integration of VMware Update Manager into the vCenter Server Appliance. Now VMware Update Manager is included by default into the vCenter Server Appliance and makes deployment and configuration a snap.

Another exclusive feature of the vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 is the improved appliance management capabilities. The vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface continues its evolution and exposes additional health and configurations. This simple user interface now shows Network and Database statistics, disk space, and health in addition to CPU and memory statistics which reduces the reliance on using a command line interface for simple monitoring and operational tasks.

Finally, VMware have added a native backup and restore capability to the vCenter Server Appliance in 6.5 to allow for simple out-of-the-box backup options in addition to the traditional supported methods including VMware Data Protection and VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection (formerly known as VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection or VADP). This new backup and restore mechanism allows customers to use a simple user interface to remove reliance on 3^rd party backup solutions to protect their vCenter Servers and Platform Services Controllers.

Note !!! All these new features are only available in the vCenter Server Appliance.