New in Software Defined Compute in vSphere 6.7

Today marks the release of the next iteration of vSphere. Most changes are the improvement of existing features and that includes what is embedded together with ESXi which is vSAN.

First, vCenter Appliance will support Single Sign On domain with embedded PSC with Hybrid Linked mode. During this release, support for the upgrade with older vCenter Server with External PSC will not be possible at release. External PSC setup is still supported. There is a Hybrid Linked Mode which will support on prem vCenter Server 6.7 with VMware Cloud on AWS vCenter Server 6.5. Lastly, this is also the last release support for vCenter Windows Server as mentioned in the last release.

There will be a backup tool and can be scheduled to help manage vCenter recovery process.

In terms of migration to vCSA, the migration tool allows asynchronize background process to reduce the amount of downtime.

The HTML5 Client (Clarity UI) has not feature priority up to 95%, up from version 6.5. You can now operate almost everything not limited to Content Library, Storage Policies, and vDS Topology Diagram to name a few. VM encryption also has more granular control to allow further customization. TLS 1.2 will be default used.

Update Manager is completely using Clarity UI.

For ESXi, the biggest change here is a new feature, "Quick Boot". This removes the need to reboot the server to the hardware boot screen but only reboot at the hypervisor level. This definitely save lots of time. Don't you hate the point to keep waiting for every single hardware device test to be done before you even reach the hypervisor or OS. To enjoy this, you need to be at least on 6.5 and upgrade to 6.7.

In terms of security, TPM is used to ensure hardware root trust with Secure Boot (in vSphere 6.5) validate boot loader and VMkernel. With the support of Windows 10 and Server 2016, VBS and Credential Guard is also supported. vTPM is also support for VM. However, do note that this requires the upgrade to the newer vHardware.

vSphere will also support Nvidia GRID for normal server VM. Suspend and resume is 

Instant clone is another big feature

One big enhancement is on EVC. From a per cluster level, you are now able to do it on a Per VM. That really make life really much easier if you do use EVC.

Check out the details here.

Update 19th Apr
Fault Tolerance now supports per VM 8 vCPU and 128GB of memory. Check out https://configmax.vmware.com/home new site for configure maximum.

VVOLs now support SCSI-3 persistent reservations which can now support WSFC. Which also means you can leverage on vSphere Replication to replicate a WSFC VM without using RDM! Check it out.