vSphere 7.0 Update 2 What's so great?
There are multiple What's update and overview when vSphere 7.0 Update 2 was released on 9th Jan 2021. I am not here to list down those however, you can check it out below.
What I like to pinpoint out here is what I find will be useful for an architect choosing the right solution for the right use case and be aware of what is useful to help customers in running it after deployed.
I will break this down into three portions in the area of vSphere with Tanzu, AI/ML Platform and vSphere improvement.
vSphere with Tanzu
As you know vSphere with Tanzu or TKG-s has been introduce when vSphere 7.0 was released. With update 2, it now able to leverage on NSX Advanced Load Balancer (previously known as AVI), an enterprise grade Load Balancer for Supervisor Cluster, Guest cluster (TKG) and Kubernetes Services of Type LoadBalancer deployed in TKG clusters. Check out this article to know more.
AL/ML Platform
If you have not followed, VMware and NVIDIA have established a new partnership to support in support of the latest Ampere family of NVIDIA GPUs and also the support for NVIDIA AI Enterprise Software Suite.
With support of Multi-Instance GPU (MIG), previously release in U1 as tech preview, this replaces the older method of time-slicing the use of vGPU. This will requires to assign a GPU profile to the VM and also requires SR-IOV to be turn on in the BIOS on the server. You can check out this article to know more.
At the same time, vSphere Bitfusion 3.0 update will include improvement to support newer CUDA version and GPU-to-GPU comunication via NVIDIA Collective Communications Library (NCCL). Other minior improvements involve in adding subsequent servers users to cluster and adding more network adaptor to Bitfusion servers.
Now this has make vSphere as a preferred platform and the only hypervsior on the market to be able support NVIDIA new technology.
vSphere Improvement
vSphere Lifecycle Manager has increased the ecosystem support that now include HPE iLO and Dell OMIVV. In this release, vLCM supports vSphere with Tanzu and NSX-T llifecycle. This now I would say covers the SDDC infrastructure components. Now you can also import cluster image from existing host or from a new host. Lastly, the best part is when doing upgrades, you can now specify whether to vMotion off the host for the VMs or simply suspend to memory for the VMs. This definitely will reduce the time taken if you were to vMotion away and back after upgrade.
- VMware vSphere 7.0 Update 2
- VMware vCenter Server 7.0 Update 2 Release Notes
- vSphere 7 Update 2 Part 2 (updated 18 Mar)
What I like to pinpoint out here is what I find will be useful for an architect choosing the right solution for the right use case and be aware of what is useful to help customers in running it after deployed.
I will break this down into three portions in the area of vSphere with Tanzu, AI/ML Platform and vSphere improvement.
vSphere with Tanzu
As you know vSphere with Tanzu or TKG-s has been introduce when vSphere 7.0 was released. With update 2, it now able to leverage on NSX Advanced Load Balancer (previously known as AVI), an enterprise grade Load Balancer for Supervisor Cluster, Guest cluster (TKG) and Kubernetes Services of Type LoadBalancer deployed in TKG clusters. Check out this article to know more.
AL/ML Platform
If you have not followed, VMware and NVIDIA have established a new partnership to support in support of the latest Ampere family of NVIDIA GPUs and also the support for NVIDIA AI Enterprise Software Suite.
With support of Multi-Instance GPU (MIG), previously release in U1 as tech preview, this replaces the older method of time-slicing the use of vGPU. This will requires to assign a GPU profile to the VM and also requires SR-IOV to be turn on in the BIOS on the server. You can check out this article to know more.
At the same time, vSphere Bitfusion 3.0 update will include improvement to support newer CUDA version and GPU-to-GPU comunication via NVIDIA Collective Communications Library (NCCL). Other minior improvements involve in adding subsequent servers users to cluster and adding more network adaptor to Bitfusion servers.
Now this has make vSphere as a preferred platform and the only hypervsior on the market to be able support NVIDIA new technology.
vSphere Improvement
vSphere Lifecycle Manager has increased the ecosystem support that now include HPE iLO and Dell OMIVV. In this release, vLCM supports vSphere with Tanzu and NSX-T llifecycle. This now I would say covers the SDDC infrastructure components. Now you can also import cluster image from existing host or from a new host. Lastly, the best part is when doing upgrades, you can now specify whether to vMotion off the host for the VMs or simply suspend to memory for the VMs. This definitely will reduce the time taken if you were to vMotion away and back after upgrade.
Check out the post and video here.
The next feature is on vMotion Auto Scale. Prior to this release, vMotion will not utilize the full link for 40GbE or 100 GbE. We need to enable multiple configurations to enable multiple streams, etc to maximize the use of it. What this release does is vMotion will automatically spins up the number of streams to tulize the bandwidth given. This not only save you on configuration requirements and have faster live-migrations when needed.
Lastly, further support by optimizing use of AMD EPYC CPU which now will give customers more option in terms of CPU. Confidential Containers for vSphere Pods, leveraging the AMD SEV-ES memory and CPU data encryption on AMD EPYC platforms for modern and easy-to-use data-in-use protections.
In the area of security, there is vSphere Native Key Provider. This is a good feature in my opinion as it will applies to a big group of customers who does not or would love to use KMS without to implement one in remote site of in their environment which do not a full flege KMS. This not only allows customers now to be able to use vSphere VM encryption but also vSAN Encryption. Check this out to find out how easy it is to setup.
Another area is to safely dispose your hardware equipment where no more worries of exposing your confidential data such as password, certificates, etc. with ESXi Configuration Encryption. This leverage on the physical TPM on the server to ensure thinngs such as boot volumes are encrypted where it can be dispose of safely and for warranty exchange.
Big changes will be coming also for the vSphere Security Configuration Guide to guide customers what is use for certain standard such as PCI DSS or HIPAA.
Last but not least VMware Tools now can help in Guest Content Distribution to allows customer to share content to the VM via any type of shared datastore and apply granular access policies. This also regulate both the vSphere and VM sides of things. Also added is a VMware Time Provider to use a low-jitter channel to synchronize time directly with hosts. This reduce the latency via the traditional methods.
Last but not least VMware Tools now can help in Guest Content Distribution to allows customer to share content to the VM via any type of shared datastore and apply granular access policies. This also regulate both the vSphere and VM sides of things. Also added is a VMware Time Provider to use a low-jitter channel to synchronize time directly with hosts. This reduce the latency via the traditional methods.
Hope this sum up all those useful items for planning and designing taking consideration what is possible into your solution.
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