VMware has announced it’s latest releases VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 3, vSAN Update 3 and Enterprise Plus Edition. With these releases, VMware focused on the enhancements to its hybrid cloud platforms as well as the integration to the cloud native applications. It’s obvious that VMware vSphere flagship products are continuing to evolve and new releases added many more features to enhance the performance, security and efficient operations for its customer environments.
Enhancements In vSphere 6.7 Update 3
Support Multiple NVIDIA® GRID Virtual GPUs (vGPUs)
VMware extended the support up to four NVIDIA vGPUs per Virtual Machine which runs Computer and graphic intensive workloads focusing the higher performance operations such as Machine Learning jobs.
2nd Generation Of AMD EPYC™ Processor Support
With the partnership of AMD, this new release supports for high-performance 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors with the enhanced security. For more information about AMD EPYC 2nd Generation Processors here.
vCenter PNID Reconfiguration Capability
When deploying a vCenter server, “system name” used as the Primary Network Identifier aka PNID for the vCenter server and changing the PNID of an existing vCenter server added with this release. It was not supported previously and it led me to few issues while I was migrating windows based vCenters to VCSA due to the internal FQDN standards in those companies.
Below prerequisites should be fulfilled in order to change the vCenter Server FQDN:
- Supports only with Embedded vCenter Servers
- “Not Recommended” when other applications such as NSX, SRM, vRA or another 2nd party plugins integrated with the vCenter Server
- Replication admins should be removed via vdcepadmin.
- VCHA should be destroyed prior to the FQDN Change
- Custom certificates should be regenerated
- Hybrid Link Mode with the Cloud vCenter should be recreated
- AD rejoin is needed
- Proper DNS records should be configured
Dynamic DNS Configuration Support
With this release VCSA has the ability to register itself in the DNS servers dynamically, eliminating the manual configuration changes in the DNS servers.
Few Driver Enhancements
VMXNET 3 v4 driver has many capabilities and it improves the Enhanced Networking Stack (ENS) and virtual device emulation. Some other features were also enhanced such as queue pairing, multi RSS feeds, etc.
vSAN 6.7 Update 3 With Cloud Native Application Support And Enterprise Plus Edition
It is true that organizations shift from traditional monolithic applications to microservices based applications in order to support cloud native on demand services and applications.
VMware has partnered with DataStax and provide ultimate solutions to next-gen applications across clouds.
Key benefits of running cloud-native applications on VMware vSAN:
- Operational Simplicity – Storage Management is under a single stack
- Enhanced Agility – Quick deployment of DataStax Enterprise on vSAN
- Increased deployment flexibility and Choice – easy scale up and down of the storage with adding nodes and compute resources
Delivers Container Ready Environment For Cloud Applications
This release enables container-ready infrastructure that can deliver high velocity scaling, multi-cloud portability and unified management for cloud applications.
vSAN Cloud native storage supports all key API objects with Kubernetes, developer has the capability of selecting profile driven storage class for their Kubernetes PODs to provide storage services.
vSAN and VVOL have two key aspects over the traditional vSphere datastore, proving the native cloud storage for the cloud applications.
- API driven provisioning to scale at the pace of containers
- Hybrid cloud portable due to consistent infrastructure and operationsAPI driven provisioning to scale at the pace of containers
Hybrid Cloud Approach With vSAN
VMware vSAN can leverage its traditional tool set to manage its cloud environments, important fact about this release is VMware vSAN has its native services with many cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud. By leveraging the same toolsets, it is quite a simple tasks to migrate the running workload to a cloud provider.
VMware also announced the upcoming release of vSAN Enterprise Plus Edition and it has many features such as Stretched clusters with local protection, vSAN Encryption, Continuous performance optimization, efficient capacity management and planning, intelligent remediation. For more information about these new releases please follow VMware Official release article.
