vSphere 7.0 introduced by VMware in March 2020 and went to GA in April 2020. Many new features like DRS & vMotion improvement and also Lifecycle Manager has been released. After half a year VMware introduced first major update on vSphere 7 and today this release went into GA. It is now publicly available, you can download it from VMware and take advantage of this latest and greatest release! Here in this blog post I will go through the new features and capabilities
Since the introduction of VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu, customers who run vSphere-only environment were asking us the possibility of running Cloud-Native workloads together with VMs on vSphere platform. Now with release of vSphere 7.0 Update 1 this capability has been unlock & available not only for VCF customers but also for vSphere-only customers. vSphere with Tanzu is the fastest way to get started with Kubernetes workloads on a developer-ready infrastructure. Utilizing this feature is the fastest way to get started with Kubernetes and get Kubernetes infrastructure up and running in an hour. You can Configure an enterprise-grade Kubernetes infrastructure leveraging your existing networking and storage.
As other previous releases, vSphere 7.0 Update 1 improves the scalability of Software-Defined Data center. With introduction of Hardware Version 18 , now VMs can scale up to 768GB vCPU and 24TB of RAM! Beside this vSphere clusters can scale up to 96 hosts and 10,000 VMs per virtual machine. If you are asking yourself about vSAN Clusters, unfortunately the limitation of vSAN cluster is still up to 64 hosts per cluster.
As most of you have realized so far, vSphere Update Manager(VUM) has been replaced by vSphere Lifecycle Manager(vLCM) since March. With introduction of vSphere 7.0 Update 1 this fantastic feature has be improve in terms of supporting NSX-T. In vSphere 7 Update 1, vLCM will also monitor for desired image compliance continuously and enable simple remediation in the event of any compliance.
Last but not least, with emerging Hybrid-Cloud strategies , now we have the capability to connect on-prem Enhanced Linked Mode(ELM) vCenter environment to multi-cloud platforms with vCenter Connect feature. With use of Cloud Gateway customers can manage their VMware Cloud on AWS or other Cloud partner offered vCenter with their on-premises vCenters in a single interface with any to any vCenter Connect capability.
Lastly I want to point out that vSAN 7.0 Update 1 is also released alongside latest vSphere release. If you want to learn more about this you can visit Duncan Epping’s website and Cormac Hogan’s website.