vSphere 7 – What’s new – In a nutshell

vSphere 7 is a MAJOR RELEASE with a NEW FACELIFT and a TON of great new features! You wanna know why it’s so pretty ? What’s new with vSphere 7 ? …. Here is a read where I will quickly highlight of some of the new capabilities and features.

Starting with the Lifecycle Manager

• Update planner which is all about product interoperability: ​Get notified and install vCenter Server updates in the vSphere Client
• Lifecycle manager which is all about consistency across ESXi hosts using declarative image cluster management.
• vCenterServer Profiles Which is all about ​Consistent configuration across vCenter Server instances – ability to export configuration of a vCenter instance, and to import it in a new vCenter instance. 
• all these components are all-integrated in the vCenter appliance.

Moving to Intrinsic Security

• Simplified Certificate management. Services now using a common certification rather than all having their own self signed trusted certificate.
• Trust authority – all about Attestation – checking if servers have Secure Booted enabled, etc. or about trusted platform modules (TPM) that run inside the server.
• Identity Federation – about now a standards-based federated way of doing authentication, ​with enterprise identity providers (IdPs)- also including Multifactor Authentication and as of vSphere 7, support ADFS out-of-the-box.

Looking at Core Virtualization

• Resource Management:
  • Improved DRS – DRS 2.0 focusing on VM DRS Score (VM happiness in a cluster) instead of Host Load Deviation (is the cluster balanced?).
  • ReVamped vMotion Logic – bringing back vMotion capabilities to large worloads (reduce performance and latency issues)
  • Assignable Hardware – integrated with DRS
• Compatibility -VM hardware 17:
  • support for Precision Time Protocol (PTP) – use for compliance needs in financial firms – it gets a VM sub-millisecond time accuracy.
  • virtual Watchdog in guest VMs
• Storage
  • supports NVMe over Fabrics allowing connectivity to external NVMe arrays using either FC or RDMA
  • Shared VMKD for clustered applications… No more RDMMMMMs!

BitFusion

Moving on to Developer Services

• Obviously with all the new features and capabilities there are a lot of new APIs exposed
• New version of PowerCLI for vSphere 7( also for WCP which is Workload Control Platform – basically vSphere with K8)
• Improved Development Center– a feature running inside vCenter which allows to capture operations done in the vCenter client UI, and transform them into code.
• Support for vRO JavaScrip, also included support for Python and Go

Unified Platform, vSphere with K8

• Cloud Foundation Services consist of the:
  • Tanzu Runtime Services – allows developers to build applications with the freedom of using an upstream K8 distribution.
  • Hybrid Infrastructure Services – allow developers to provision and work with infrastructure such as compute, storage and networking from the vSphere platform

But there’s a lot more to it and that’s definitely something that I will write about in an upcoming article.