vSphere 7 has been announced, as part of a number of new product offerings as part of a portfolio of products designed to offer a comprehensive stack for modern applications. vSphere 7 is among a new collection of products making up the VMware Tanzu portfolio for modern applications, and VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu. You can check out the launch video for vSphere 7 here. VMware announced the following product releases:
- ESXi 7.0
- vCenter Server 7.0
- vSAN 7.0
- vSphere with Kubernetes on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0
- vRealize Operations (vROPS) 8.1 & Cloud
- vRealize Automation (vRA) and Orchestrator (vRO) 8.1 & Cloud
- vRealize Log Insight 8.1 (vRLI) & Cloud
In this article I will be taking a look at what is new in vCenter and ESXi 7.
So, Whats New in vSphere 7
vSphere 7 is available in different editions, these are:
- Standard: Server Consolidation and Business Continuity
- Enterprise Plus: Resource Management, Simplified Lifecycle Management, Intrinsic Security, Resiliency and Performance for Enhanced Applications
You can check out what’s available in each edition here.
In addition to this there is vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, which is available through VMware Cloud Foundation.
Let’s take a look at some of the new features in vSphere 7.
New Features – vCenter and ESXi
In this post, this will just be a high level list of some of the new features, in future posts we’ll dig into some of the features in more detail.
- vCenter Server Profiles – Used to import settings configured in the vCenter Appliance’s VAMI. Aimed at making managing multiple vCenter appliances easier by being able to import and export configuration, and validate that it matches what is expected.
- vCenter Content Library – Improvements including template versioning.
- vCenter Server Multi-homing – 4 NICs are now supported on a vCenter server
- vCenter and ESXi configuration limits (you can check these out here, though not yet updated for vSphere 7 at the time of writing). Looking at the feature comparison datasheet, we can see that with vSphere 7 you can have (some of which are a significant increase from vSphere 6.7):
- 96 Hosts per cluster
- 8000 VMs per cluster
- 2500 Hosts per vCenter Server
- 30000 Powered On VMs per vCenter Server
- 768 CPUs per host
- 16 TB RAM per host
- 1024 VMs per host
- 128 vCPUs per VM
- 6TB RAM per VM
- VM Hardware Version 17
- External Platform Service Controllers have been depreciated – there is now no option to deploy an external PSC with vCenter. There is now the option during deployment to change/merge an external PSC to an embedded one.
- Option to convert existing Windows based vCenter to a vCSA during deployment. More detail on this here.
- vCenter Server Update Planner – This is a completely new feature, designed to make update planning easier – showing how updates may affect compatibility between VMware products.
- Identity Federation with ADFS – vCenter Servers can now federate with ADFS.
- Cluster Image Management – Create images at the cluster level that dictate how hosts within the cluster will be configured.
- DRS has been given an update. I’ll be looking at this closer in another article, but at a high level, VMs are now given a happiness score, that is calculated by looking at a number of metrics. DRS will migrate a VM to a different host if it decides it can improve it.
- vMotion has been updated to offer improved performance when migrating large virtual machines. There’s a detailed post on this here.
vSphere 7 with Kubernetes
Kubernetes is now built into vSphere, available through VMware Cloud Foundation. VMware Cloud Foundation Services consists of two families of services:
- Tanzu Runtime Services and Hybrid Infrastructure Services. Powered by innovations in vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, these services enable a self-service experience through Kubernetes APIs. Tanzu Runtime Services allow developers to build applications with freedom using the upstream conformant Kubernetes distributions.
- Hybrid Infrastructure Services allow developers to provision and work with infrastructure such as compute, storage, and networking.
- Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service: The Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service allows developers to manage consistent, compliant and conformant Kubernetes clusters
- vSphere Pod Service: The vSphere Pod Service allows developers to run containers directly on the hypervisor for improved security, performance, and manageability
- Storage Service: The Volume Service allows developers to manage persistent disks for use with containers, Kubernetes and virtual machines
- Network Service: The Network Service allows developers to manage Virtual Routers, Load Balancers and Firewall Rules
- Registry Service: The Registry Service allows developers to store, manage and secure Docker and OCI images
Hopefully this has given you an overview of some of the exciting new features coming in vSphere 7!