vSphere 6.7 Announced (BAW11)
Yesterday, it was announced by VMware that the latest release of vSphere will be vSphere 6.7.
vSphere 6.7 builds on the great work that has been done with vSphere 6.5, to provide simple management and operational efficiency.
With vSphere 6.7 there is an enhanced vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA). This introduces new APIs that will improve the efficiency and experience to deploy vCenter, deploy multiple vCenters based on a template and to make the management of the vCenter Server Appliance significantly easier. This includes improved backup and restore capabilities for the appliance.
The vSphere 6.7 vCSA also offers major performance improvements over 6.5, such as:
- 2 x faster performance in vCenter operations per second
- 3 x reduction in memory usage
- 3 x faster DRS-related operations (e.q. power-on virtual machine)
vSphere hosts also see an improvement when updating ESXi hosts. Major upgrades now benefit from a Single Reboot capability reducing the requirement for two reboots when performing an upgrade. vSphere Quick Boot is another new innovation that restarts the ESXi hypervisor without rebooting the physical host, skipping time-consuming hardware initialization.
Something that is close to my heart is the HTML5-based vSphere Client, having struggled through earlier versions of the web client. In vSphere 6.7 this has further been enhanced to include key functionality like managing NSX, vSAN, VUM and third-party components.
Security plays a big part in vSphere 6.7 with us seeing support added for Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 hardware devices and also the introduction of Virtual TPM 2.0, significantly enhancing protection and assuring integrity for both the hypervisor and the guest operating system. This should help to prevent the VMs and hosts being tampered with.
Data encryption capabilities are also enhanced in this latest version, with simplified workflows for VM Encryption, designed to protect data at rest and in motion. This brings me onto the enabling of encrypted vMotion across different vCenter instances, as well as versions, making it easy to securely conduct data center migrations.
vSphere 6.7 also introduces support for the entire range of Microsoft’s Virtualization Based Security technologies.
There are simply too many items to list out in full in this blog and therefore I would urge you to take a look at the VMware Blog post for more details and about the additional features not covered here:
https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2018/04/introducing-vmware-vsphere-6-7.html?src=so_5a314d05e49f5&cid=70134000001SkJn
Blog-a-Week 2018 Posting (BAW):
In previous years, I have had periods throughout the year where I have been unable to post an entry to my blog. During 2018, my aim is to post a blog entry each week of the year. I’m hoping that the blog entries will all be useful bits of information or items that I’ve been working on recently but if the standard of the entries drops, I apologise now, as this could have been a busy week and I wasn’t able to put in as much time as I would have liked into the post