VMware vSphere 7 has landed and I know I am excited to get it deployed. I am eager to try out all the new features and get a feel for what’s new. From all the content that I’ve been reading, it looks like some of the key improvements are around security, performance, and resiliency of infrastructure and applications including Lifecycle management. I think we can all agree that the role of the vSphere admin is changing as new technologies are added to the stack like Kubernetes and containers.
Pete Chargin writes on the VMware vSphere Blog:
The purpose of this major release from vSphere is two-fold. The first is to embed containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines as first class citizens. This enables all vSphere administrators to become Kubernetes administrators and easily deliver new services to their developers. More on this in part two of this blog post, when vSphere 7 with Kubernetes becomes available as part of VMware Cloud Foundation 4. If you’re interested in vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, please visit the VMware Cloud Foundation blog site to learn more.
The second purpose of this major release is to deliver an essential building block of the cloud operating model to vSphere admins for running existing enterprise applications with vSphere 7. vSphere 7 addresses key challenges faced by our vSphere admins in areas of lifecycle management, security, and performance and resiliency needed by business-critical applications, AI/ML applications and latency sensitive applications.
Keeping systems up to date with patches and firmware can seem like a never-ending task. Finding change windows for system downtime can also become a challenge. When you add the complexity of a virtual environment updates can become time-consuming especially when you have to update your environment in a particular order. vSphere 7 now allows for updates to entire clusters vs single hosts, this new model uses what’s called a desired state model.
vSphere 7 offers a much simpler software architecture with a single upgrade workflow. With vSphere 7, the only requirement is to upgrade vCenter Server; there is no need to upgrade other external components such as the external PSC (Platform Services Controller) or load balancers. This results in a more efficient upgrade process given the fewer nodes that need to be managed.
Also, vSphere 7 enables the upgrades of entire ESXi clusters (versus a single ESXi host at a time) using a desired state model with cluster image management. The desired state model of the upgrade validates each host’s configuration until it matches the desired state. This simplifies and automates the host upgrade significantly for the entire ESXi cluster, once customers have upgraded to vSphere 7. Note that customers would have to upgrade to vSphere 7 to take advantage of the desired state model for future upgrades.
Improvements to DRS and vMotion can now move larger applications like SAP HANA. Allowing you to do more with vSphere and allow every kind of application to be hosted by your vSphere cloud environment.
What’s got you excited about the vSphere 7 news today? Is this something you will be upgrading to right away? Let me know on Twitter and thanks for reading.