among many interesting new feautures, i've noticed one which seems quite good for Veeam (and for any snapshot-based data protector) users: Fault Tolerance supports up to 4 vCPU and... SNAPSHOTS!!
I don't think it's generally available yet (based on VMware website). Yes, removing vCPU limitation on FT VMs is a good move, though I'm still not sure it is enough for servers that are running on heavy load.
yes, i.e. you will still need clustering applications or services (such as SQL servers) in critical applications, especially because you have to safely patch them.
However i guess FT will become a really usable feature, today it isn't.
Second, be careful the new FT will require double disk space, since each copy of the VM will have its own set of virtual disks, there will be no more a single vmdk used by both VMs. This is the main reason why now it will be possible to snapshot them, instead of the previous "lockstep" technology, basically now is like having two distinct VMs replicating disk and memory in real time.
PS: for SQL servers I think a better solution is still to upgrade to always-on clustering, FT will be maybe useful for legacy applications that cannot be clustered.
Luca Dell'Oca Principal EMEA Cloud Architect @ Veeam Software