VMware has announced vSphere 8, a new version of VMware’s hypervisor.
There are a lot of new features introduced by VMware vSphere 8. So let’s have a look!
So why Upgrade to vsphere 8?
It is important to ensure that your vSphere environment is in support and remains! See the table below with the announced support term.
When you upgrade the vSphere environment to version 8, you workload remains supported for a long period of time.
See this BLOG with tips how to upgrade you VMware vSphere to version 8.
vSphere 8 overview:
The features you see below and much more are now described on the VMware What’s NEW in vSphere 8 website.
There is also a new free E-BOOK available.
–VMware vSphere® Distributed Services EngineTM
–Expanded usage of vGPUs
-DirectPath I/O count
-Vendor Device Group
-DRS support for vSphere Memory Monitoring and Remediation (vMMR)
–vMotion on Intel® Scalable I/O Virtualization devices (SIOV)
-vSphere Green Metrics
-vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) enhancements
-Workload Availability Zones
-Tanzu Mission Control Essentials
Sphere 8 – Feature to Editions mapping:
vCenter 8 – Portfolio Editions
There are 3 vCenter license editions.
See the illustration below:
vSphere 8 Scalability
VMware vSphere 8 supports new configurations Maximus, which can be found here.
See a comparison with configuration maximus based on vShere 7U3 and vSphere 8.
Maximize Performance For Latency Sensitive Workloads
vShere 8 introduced Virtual Hardware level 20 which unlocks some great new features.
Let’s start with High Latency Sensitivity with Hyper-threading which is designed to support high latency sensitive workloads and deliver improved performance.
A virtual machine’s vCPU are scheduled on the same hyper-threaded physical CPU core.
This feature can be enabled on the advanced virtual machine setting and requires VM hardware level 20, which is introduced by VMware vSphere 8.
vSphere 8 Security improvements
Prevent execution of untrusted binaries: ESXi 8.0 will turn on the execInstalledOnly option by default. This prevents the execution of binaries that are not installed via a VIB.
TLS 1.2 only: vSphere 8 will not support TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1. Both have previously been disabled by default in vSphere 7 and are now removed in vSphere 8.
SSH Automatic Timeout: SSH access is deactivated by default and in vSphere 8 a default timeout is introduced to prevent SSH sessions lingering.
Sandboxed Daemons: ESXi 8.0 daemons and processes run in their own sandboxed domain where only the minimum required permissions are available to the process.
Discontinuation of Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 1.2: ESXi 8.0 displays a warning during installation or upgrade if a TPM 1.2 device is present. The install or upgrade is not prevented.
Get Certified! Data Center Virtualization 2022 (VCP-DCV 2022)
There are several paths to obtain a certification for VMware vSphere 8.
This VMware certification webpage offers you all the information you wil need, including the VCP exam BLUEPRINT, related course available based on VMware vSphere 8 and the certification path requirements.
The following course is available: VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage [V8]