Hi vAdmins,
Time flies by, and so does the development of VMware vSphere with the announcement of update 1 for version 8.
This blog describes some of the brand new features including major improvements.
This blog will focus on 3 pillars:
1: Enhance Operational Efficiency
Efficiently reduce IT maintenance windows
2: Supercharge Workload Performance.
Meet the trough and latency needs of modern distributed workloads
3 Elevate Security.
Improve security for your mission-critical workloads.
Improve Host Lifecycle Management with a Declarative model:
The vSphere Configuration Profiles capability from now supports a cluster wide configuration.
This feature contributes significantly to the efficiency of the cluster management side but also reduces the risk of disruption that can occur due to a configuration mismatch.
Use case: This feature minimizes manual configuration and improves efficiency for vAdmins by managing the desired host configuration, compliance, remediation, and security standards can be seamlessly maintained at a cluster level!
Another powerful feature is the option to easily copy host configurations for all hosts when new clusters are created.
Recap: vSphere Configurations Profiles capability is superior to host profiles due to the ease of doing below at a cluster level
Improve GPU Utilization.
Starting from now it is possible to deploy different types of workloads and assign the workload to different vGPU profile types.
NVIDIA vGPU Software version 15 supports heterogeneous vGPU profile types and hence workloads can be run on a GPU.
This new capability will help admins improve GPU utilization, reduce workload fragmentation in GPUs and hence reduce costs.
Improve Performance of Big-Sized AI/ML Workloads.
More is better, right?
AI/ML workloads are getting continuously bigger and more complex. vSphere 8 update 1 adding support for NVIDIA NVSwitch capabilities for up to 8 GPUs per host
Get Support for Modern Cloud-Based Identity Providers.
Sphere 8 Update 1 brings modern cloud-based identity provider support to vCenter, starting with Okta.
vCenter already supports 3rd party identity sources, Active Directory and OpenLDAP. vSphere 8 update 1 introduces OKTA as an Identity provider including 2FA functionality. You can log in and will be able to log in once for both vCenter and NSX manager.
Achieve Higher Availability and Security for VMs.
Some restrictions on security features (see below) are dropped. From now on you can tarting with better security integration without any compromise!
Support Fault Tolerance of VMs Employing vTPM.
ESXi Quick Boot Support on Servers With TPM 2.0 Chip
Self-Service for Troubleshooting vSphere Issues.
With vSphere 8 update 1, Skyline Health and Diagnostics are e integrated within vCenter. This will make it easy for vAdmins to troubleshoot vCenter and ESXi issues and hence improve availability.
This tool provides insight like Identify any hardware, or software compatibility issues that may impact the update or upgrade of vSphere.
End of this post.
Disclaimer: This blog is based on my personal title and assumptions. No rights can be derived from this blog.