Virtualization technology has revolutionized the world of IT infrastructure, providing businesses with increased flexibility, scalability, and efficiency. VMware, a leading virtualization software provider, has been at the forefront of this transformation with its flagship product, vSphere. With each new release, vSphere brings a wealth of exciting features and enhancements. In this blog post, we'll delve into what's new in vSphere 8, the latest iteration of this powerful virtualization platform.
VMware vSphere 8 is a enterprise workload platform that extends cloud-based benefits to on-premises workloads. It boosts performance with DPU and GPU acceleration, improves operational efficiency with the VMware Cloud Console, integrates seamlessly with add-on hybrid cloud services, and accelerates innovation with an enterprise-ready integrated Kubernetes runtime that runs containers alongside VMs.
A. vSphere Distributed Services Engine
vSphere Distributed Services Engine, originally Project Monterey, is now available. The vSphere Distributed Services Engine unleashes the potential of Data Processing Units (DPUs) for hardware-accelerated data processing, enhancing infrastructure performance, increasing infrastructure security, and simplifying DPU lifecycle management. vSphere 8 makes it simple for workloads to take use of the benefits of DPUs.
1. Data Processing Unit
Data Processing Units (DPU) exist today and live in the hardware layer, similar to a PCIe device like a NIC or GPU. Today networking, storage and host management services run in the instance of ESXi virtualizing the x86 compute layer. For more information on the DPU, please refer to this blog from VMware.
2. vSphere Distributed Services Engine
In vSphere 8, an additional instance of ESXi is installed directly on the Data Processing Unit. This allows ESXi services to be offloaded to the DPU for increased performance. In vSphere 8 GA, greenfield installations with support for network offloading with NSX is supported. vSphere Distributed Services Engine is life-cycle managed using vSphere Lifecycle Manager. When remediating a host that contains a DPU ESXi installation, the DPU ESXi version is always remediated with the parent host and kept in version lock-step.
3. Simple Configuration for Network Offloads
Using a vSphere Distributed Switch version 8.0 and NSX, network services are offloaded to the DPU, allowing for increased network performance with no x86 CPU overhead, enhanced visibility for the network traffic and the security, isolation and protection you would expect from NSX.
B. vSphere with Tanzu
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on vSphere 8 consolidates the Tanzu Kubernetes offerings into a single unified Kubernetes runtime from VMware.
Workload Availability Zones are used to isolate workloads across vSphere clusters. supervisor clusters and Tanzu Kubernetes clusters can be deployed across zones to increase the availability of the clusters by ensuring that nodes are not sharing the same vSphere clusters.
ClusterClass is a way to declaratively specify your cluster’s configuration through the open-source ClusterAPI project.
PhotonOS and Ubuntu base images can be customized and saved to the content library for use in Tanzu Kubernetes clusters.
Pinniped Integration comes to the supervisor clusters and Tanzu Kubernetes clusters. Pinniped supports LDAP and OIDC federated authentication. You can define identity providers that can be used to authenticate users to the supervisor clusters and Tanzu Kubernetes clusters.
C. Lifecycle Management
vSphere 8 introduces DPU support for vSphere Lifecycle Manager to automatically remediate the ESXi installation on a DPU in lock-step with the host ESXi version. Staging of update/upgrade payloads, parallel remediation and standalone host support combine to bring vLCM up to feature parity with Update Manager. Standalone hosts can be managed using vSphere Lifecycle Manager via API. VMware Compatibility Guide details what vLCM features a Hardware Support Manager can support.
1. Deprecation Awareness
Baseline lifecycle management, previously known as vSphere Update Manager, is deprecated in vSphere 8. This means that baseline lifecycle management is still supported in vSphere 8, but that vSphere 8 will be the last release that supports baseline lifecycle management.
2. Stage Cluster Image Updates to Speed Up Remediation
vSphere Lifecycle Manager can stage update payloads to the hosts in advance of remediation. Staging can be performed without maintenance mode. This reduces the time needed for the hosts to spend in maintenance mode. Firmware payloads can also be staged with integration from a supported Hardware Support Manager.
3. Quicker Cluster Remediation
vSphere Lifecycle Manager can remediate multiple hosts in parallel, dramatically reducing the overall time needed to remediate an entire cluster. Hosts placed into maintenance mode can be remediated in parallel. A vSphere administrator can choose to remediate all hosts in maintenance mode or define the number of parallel remediations to perform at a given time. Hosts not placed into maintenance mode are not remediated during this lifecycle operation.
4. Configuration Management at Scale
vSphere 8 introduces a technical preview of vSphere Configuration Profiles, the next generation of cluster configuration management. Desired configuration is defined at the cluster object and applied to all hosts in the cluster. All hosts in the cluster have a consistent configuration applied. Configuration drift is monitored for and notified about. A vSphere Administrator can remediate the configuration drift.
vSphere Configuration Profiles is still under active development and future releases of vSphere 8 will expand and enhance its support. Host Profiles continue to be supported in vSphere 8.
5. Enhanced Recovery of vCenter
vCenter reconciles cluster state after a restore from backup. ESXi hosts in a cluster contain a distributed key-value store of cluster state. The distributed key-value store is the source of truth for the state of the cluster. If vCenter is restored from a backup, it will reconcile the cluster state and configuration with the distributed key-value store. In vSphere 8 GA, host-cluster membership is reconciled with additional configuration and state planned for support in future releases.
D. Guest OS & Workloads
1. Virtual Hardware Version 20
Virtual Hardware version 20 is the latest virtual hardware version. The theme for hardware version 20 brings new virtual hardware innovations, enhances guest services for applications, and increases performance and scale for certain workloads.
2. Deploy Windows 11 at Scale
Introducing TPM Provision Policy. Windows 11 requires vTPM devices to be present in virtual machines. Cloning a VM with a vTPM VM can introduce a security risk as TPM secrets are cloned. In vSphere 8 vTPM devices can be automatically replaced during clone or deployment operations. This allows best practices that each VM contain a unique TPM device be followed and improves vSphere support for Windows 11 deployment at scale. vSphere 8.0 also includes the vpxd.clone.tpmProvisionPolicy advanced setting to make the default clone behaviour for vTPMs to be replace.
3. Reduce Outages by Preparing Applications for Migration
Certain applications cannot tolerate the stuns associated with vSphere vMotion. These applications can be written to be migration aware to improve their interoperability with vSphere vMotion. Applications can prepare for a migration event. This could be gracefully stopping services or performing a failover in the case of a clustered application. The application can delay the start of the migration up until the configured timeout but cannot decline or prevent the migration from occurring.
Use-cases include:
Time-sensitive applications
VoIP applications
Clustered applications
4. Maximize Performance for Latency Sensitive Workloads
Emerging Telco workloads require increased support for latency sensitivity applications. High Latency Sensitivity with Hyper-threading is designed to support these workloads and deliver improved performance. A virtual machine's vCPU are scheduled on the same hyper-threaded physical CPU core.
5. API Driven vSphere and Guest Data Sharing
vSphere DataSets provide an easy method distribute small, infrequently changing data between the vSphere management layer and a guest operating system running in a virtual machine with VMware Tools installed. Uses cases may include Guest deployment status, Guest agent configuration or Guest inventory management. vSphere DataSets live with the VM object, and will move with the VM if migrated, even across vCenter Server instances.
E. Improved Security and Compliance:
Security is a critical aspect of any IT infrastructure. vSphere 8 introduces several new security features to help organizations safeguard their virtual environments. These include encrypted vMotion, secure boot for ESXi hosts, TPM 2.0 support, discontinuation of TLS 1.0 and 1.1, Sandboxed Daemons and enhanced support for secure booting of virtual machines. These features enhance the overall security posture of the vSphere environment and help organizations meet their compliance requirements.
Please note that most of the content for this blog was pulled directly from this VMware page in order to showcase what's new in vSphere 8. In subsequent blog postings, we will go over the features in further detail.
In conclusion, vSphere 8 represents a significant milestone in the evolution of VMware's virtualization platform. With its enhanced Kubernetes integration, vSphere with Tanzu, VMware Cloud Foundation integration, improved vCenter Server, strengthened security measures, streamlined lifecycle management through vSphere Lifecycle Manager, and performance and scalability enhancements, vSphere 8 provides organizations with the tools they need to build and manage modern, efficient, and secure IT environments. As we delve deeper into each of these features in upcoming blog posts, we will explore the immense potential they offer for organizations seeking to optimize their infrastructure and embrace the benefits of virtualization technology. Stay tuned for more in-depth discussions on the exciting features of vSphere 8 and how they can revolutionize your IT operations.
Thank you for reading!
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