Today , April 28th 2020, DellEMC VxRail team released VxRail 7.0 software package which supports vSphere 7.0a. This software package includes;
- VxRail Manager 7.0.000 build 16050759
- VMware ESXi 7.0 GA build 15843807
- VMware vCenter Server 7.0 GA build 15952498
- VMware vSAN 7.0 GA build 15843807
- VMware vRealize Log Insight 4.8.0 GA build 13036238
The new VxRail train is jumped from 4.7 to 7.0 with the aim to align VxRail software version with vSphere 7.0 and vSAN 7.0. It is very important because now VxRail updates are more in sync with vSphere and vSAN updates. As DellEMC also stated the primary focus of this VxRail release is our synchronous release commitment to the vSphere 7.0 release. Aside support for vSphere and vSAN 7.0 main highlight in new VxRail 7.0 release is the support for vDS 7.0 converged networking in NSX-T 3.0.
Converged vDS support with NSX-T 3.0
NSX-T 3.0 implementations on VxRail can take advantage of NSX-T 3.0 new features to utilize vSphere Distributed Switch(vDS) instead of using NSX-Managed Distributed Switch(NvDS). Needless to say, this feature makes NSX-T implementations and maintenance less complex. There is no more hard requirements to have extra two pNICs for NvDS consupmtion. NSX-T 3.0 can share vDS with other vSphere system traffic like Management, vSAN and vMotion. This is also enhances and simplifies Micro-segmentation only projects with utilizing the known vDS.
If you are aiming to upgrade to VxRail 7.0, be aware that you can use only local upgrade option. Meaning that you need to download the upgrade bundle from Dell’s support portal and then run the upgrade process with help of downloaded upgrade bundle. The upgrade process to this release will be covered in later blog post.