Month: October 2020

vSphere 7.0 Update 1 Released

Well its out now after the comments in september to say it was due to be out we now have update 1 released to all.

We have a number updates as listed below from the release notes, the most interesting of all is vSphere with Tanzu which is something im really interested to have a play with.

What’s New

  • ESXi 7.0 Update 1 supports vSphere Quick Boot on the following servers:
    • HPE ProLiant BL460c Gen9
    • HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10 Plus
    • HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen9
    • HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Plus
    • HPE ProLiant XL225n Gen10 Plus
    • HPE Synergy 480 Gen9
  • Enhanced vSphere Lifecycle Manager hardware compatibility pre-checks for vSAN environments: ESXi 7.0 Update 1 adds vSphere Lifecycle Manager hardware compatibility pre-checks. The pre-checks automatically trigger after certain change events such as modification of the cluster desired image or addition of a new ESXi host in vSAN environments. Also, the hardware compatibility framework automatically polls the Hardware Compatibility List database at predefined intervals for changes that trigger pre-checks as necessary.
  • Increased number of vSphere Lifecycle Manager concurrent operations on clusters: With ESXi 7.0 Update 1, if you initiate remediation at a data center level, the number of clusters on which you can run remediation in parallel, increases from 15 to 64 clusters.
  • vSphere Lifecycle Manager support for coordinated updates between availability zones: With ESXi 7.0 Update 1, to prevent overlapping operations, vSphere Lifecycle Manager updates fault domains in vSAN clusters in a sequence. ESXi hosts within each fault domain are still updated in a rolling fashion. For vSAN stretched clusters, the first fault domain is always the preferred site.
  • Extended list of supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu versions for the VMware vSphere Update Manager Download Service (UMDS): ESXi 7.0 Update 1 adds new Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu versions that UMDS supports. For the complete list of supported versions, see Supported Linux-Based Operating Systems for Installing UMDS.
  • Improved control of VMware Tools time synchronization: With ESXi 7.0 Update 1, you can select a VMware Tools time synchronization mode from the vSphere Client instead of using the command prompt. When you navigate to VM Options > VMware Tools > Synchronize Time with Host, you can select Synchronize at startup and resume (recommended)Synchronize time periodically, or, if no option is selected, you can prevent synchronization.
  • Increased Support for Multi-Processor Fault Tolerance (SMP-FT) maximums: With ESXi 7.0 Update 1, you can configure more SMP-FT VMs, and more total SMP-FT vCPUs in an ESXi host, or a cluster, depending on your workloads and capacity planning. 
  • Virtual hardware version 18: ESXi Update 7.0 Update 1 introduces virtual hardware version 18 to enable support for virtual machines with higher resource maximums, and:
    • Secure Encrypted Virtualization – Encrypted State (SEV-ES)
    • Virtual remote direct memory access (vRDMA) native endpoints
    • EVC Graphics Mode (vSGA).
  • Increased resource maximums for virtual machines and performance enhancements:
    • With ESXi 7.0 Update 1, you can create virtual machines with three times more virtual CPUs and four times more memory to enable applications with larger memory and CPU footprint to scale in an almost linear fashion, comparable with bare metal. Virtual machine resource maximums are up to 768 vCPUs from 256 vCPUs, and to 24 TB of virtual RAM from 6 TB. Still, not over-committing memory remains a best practice. Only virtual machines with hardware version 18 and operating systems supporting such large configurations can be set up with these resource maximums.
    • Performance enhancements in ESXi that support the larger scale of virtual machines include widening of the physical address, address space optimizations, better NUMA awareness for guest virtual machines, and more scalable synchronization techniques. vSphere vMotion is also optimized to work with the larger virtual machine configurations.
    • ESXi hosts with AMD processors can support virtual machines with twice more vCPUs, 256, and up to 8 TB of RAM.
    • Persistent memory (PMEM) support is up twofold to 12 TB from 6 TB for both Memory Mode and App Direct Mode.

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2020/10/announcing-general-availability-vsphere-7-update-1.html