We are excited to share that today VMware is announcing vSphere 6.7, the latest release of the industry-leading virtualization and cloud platform. vSphere 6.7 is the efficient and secure platform for hybrid clouds, fueling digital transformation by delivering simple and efficient management at scale, comprehensive built-in security, a universal application platform, and seamless hybrid cloud experience.

vSphere 6.7 delivers key capabilities to enable IT organizations address the following notable trends that are putting new demands on their IT infrastructure:

• Explosive growth in quantity and variety of applications, from business critical apps to new intelligent workloads.
• Rapid growth of hybrid cloud environments and use cases.
• On-premises data centers growing and expanding globally, including at the Edge.
• Security of infrastructure and applications attaining paramount importance.

Let’s take a look at some of the key capabilities in vSphere 6.7:

Simple and Efficient Management, at Scale

vSphere 6.7 builds on the technological innovation delivered by vSphere 6.5, and elevates the customer experience to an entirely new level. It provides exceptional management simplicity, operational efficiency, and faster time to market, all at scale.

vSphere 6.7 delivers an exceptional experience for the user with an enhancedvCenter Server Appliance (vCSA). It introduces several new APIs that improve the efficiency and experience to deploy vCenter, to deploy multiple vCenters based on a template, to make management of vCenter Server Appliance significantly easier, as well as for backup and restore. It also significantly simplifies the vCenter Server topology through vCenter with embedded platform services controller in enhanced linked mode, enabling customers to link multiple vCenters and have seamless visibility across the environment without the need for an external platform services controller or load balancers.

Moreover, with vSphere 6.7 vCSA delivers phenomenal performance improvements (all metrics compared at cluster scale limits, versus vSphere 6.5):

• 2X faster performance in vCenter operations per second
• 3X reduction in memory usage
• 3X faster DRS-related operations (e.g. power-on virtual machine)

These performance improvements ensure a blazing fast experience for vSphere users, and deliver significant value, as well as time and cost savings in a variety of use cases, such as VDI, Scale-out apps, Big Data, HPC, DevOps, distributed cloud native apps, etc.

vSphere 6.7 improves efficiency at scale when updating ESXi hosts, significantly reducing maintenance time by eliminating one of two reboots normally required for major version upgrades (Single Reboot). In addition to that, vSphere Quick Boot is a new innovation that restarts the ESXi hypervisor without rebooting the physical host, skipping time-consuming hardware initialization.

Another key component that allows vSphere 6.7 to deliver a simplified and efficient experience is the graphical user interface itself. The HTML5-based vSphere Client provides a modern user interface experience that is both responsive and easy to use. With vSphere 6.7, it includes added functionality to support not only the typical workflows customers need but also other key functionality like managing NSX, vSAN, VUM as well as third-party components.

Comprehensive Built-In Security

vSphere 6.7 builds on the security capabilities in vSphere 6.5 and leverages its unique position as the hypervisor to offer comprehensive security that starts at the core, via an operationally simple policy-driven model.

vSphere 6.7 adds support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 hardware devices and also introduces Virtual TPM 2.0, significantly enhancing protection and assuring integrity for both the hypervisor and the guest operating system. This capability helps prevent VMs and hosts from being tampered with, prevents the loading of unauthorized components and enables guest operating system security features security teams are asking for.

Here's the plot: 'Tyler Gage (Channing Tatum) has been in and out of trouble for most of his life and after finding himself before the judge again, he is sentenced to 200 hours of community service mopping floors at the Maryland School of the Arts. Watch step up movies online free. Now, before we get into the fundamentals of how you can watch 'Step Up' right now, here are some particulars about the Summit Entertainment, Eketahuna LLC drama flick. Released August 11th, 2006, 'Step Up' stars,,, The PG-13 movie has a runtime of about 1 hr 38 min, and received a score of 48 (out of 100) on Metacritic, which assembled reviews from 23 well-known critics. What, so now you want to know what the movie’s about?

Data encryption was introduced with vSphere 6.5 and very well received. With vSphere 6.7, VM Encryption is further enhanced and more operationally simple to manage. vSphere 6.7 simplifies workflows for VM Encryption, designed to protect data at rest and in motion, making it as easy as a right-click while also increasing the security posture of encrypting the VM and giving the user a greater degree of control to protect against unauthorized data access.

vSphere 6.7 also enhances protection for data in motion by enabling encrypted vMotion across different vCenterinstances as well as versions, making it easy to securely conduct data center migrations, move data across a hybrid cloud environment (between on-premises and public cloud), or across geographically distributed data centers.

vSphere 6.7 introduces support for the entire range of Microsoft’s Virtualization Based Security technologies. This is a result of close collaboration between VMware and Microsoft to ensure Windows VMs on vSphere support in-guest security features while continuing to run performant and secure on the vSphere platform.

vSphere 6.7 delivers comprehensive built-in security and is the heart of a secure SDDC. It has deep integration and works seamlessly with other VMware products such as vSAN, NSX and vRealize Suite to provide a complete security model for the data center.

Universal Application Platform

vSphere 6.7 is a universal application platform that supports new workloads (including 3D Graphics, Big Data, HPC, Machine Learning, In-Memory, and Cloud-Native) as well as existing mission critical applications. It also supports and leverages some of the latest hardware innovations in the industry, delivering exceptional performance for a variety of workloads.

vSphere 6.7 further enhances the support and capabilities introduced for GPUs through VMware’s collaboration with Nvidia, by virtualizing Nvidia GPUs even for non-VDI and non-general-purpose-computing use cases such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data and more. With enhancements to Nvidia GRID™ vGPU technology in vSphere 6.7, instead of having to power off workloads running on GPUs, customers can simply suspend and resume those VMs, allowing for better lifecycle management of the underlying host and significantly reducing disruption for end-users. VMware continues to invest in this area, with the goal of bringing the full vSphere experience to GPUs in future releases.

vSphere 6.7 continues to showcase VMware’s technological leadership and fruitful collaboration with our key partners by adding support for a key industry innovation poised to have a dramatic impact on the landscape, which is persistent memory. With vSphere Persistent Memory, customers using supported hardware modules, such as those available from Dell-EMC and HPE, can leverage them either as super-fast storage with high IOPS, or expose them to the guest operating system as non-volatile memory. This will significantly enhance performance of the OS as well as applications across a variety of use cases, making existing applications faster and more performant and enabling customers to create new high-performance applications that can leverage vSphere Persistent Memory.

Also check out the VirtualBlocksCore Storage 6.7 blog where you can find more information about new storage and network features such as Native 4Kn disk support, RDMA support, and Intel VMD for NVMe that further enhance Enterprise Applications running on vSphere.

Seamless Hybrid Cloud Experience

With the fast adoption of vSphere-based public clouds through VMware Cloud Provider Program partners, VMware Cloud on AWS, as well as other public cloud providers, VMware is committed to delivering a seamless hybrid cloud experience for customers.

vSphere 6.7 introduces vCenter Server Hybrid Linked Mode, which makes it easy and simple for customers to have unified visibility and manageability across an on-premises vSphere environment running on one version and VMware Cloud on AWS, running on a different version of vSphere. This ensures that the fast pace of innovation and introduction of new capabilities in VMware Cloud on AWS does not force the customer to constantly update and upgrade their on-premises vSphere environment.

vSphere 6.7 also introduces Cross-Cloud Cold and Hot Migration, further enhancing the ease of management across and enabling a seamless and non-disruptive hybrid cloud experience for customers.

As virtual machines migrate between different data centers or from an on-premises data center to the cloud and back, they likely move across different CPU types. vSphere 6.7 delivers a new capability that is key for the hybrid cloud, called Per-VM EVC. Per-VM EVC enables the EVC (Enhanced vMotion Compatibility) mode to become an attribute of the VM rather than the specific processor generation it happens to be booted on in the cluster. This allows for seamless migration across different CPUs by persisting the EVC mode per-VM during migrations across clusters and during power cycles.

Previously, vSphere 6.0 introduced provisioning between vCenter instances. This is often called “cross-vCenter provisioning.” The use of two vCenter instances introduces the possibility that the instances are on different release versions. vSphere 6.7 enables customers to use different vCenter versions while allowing cross-vCenter, mixed-version provisioning operations (vMotion, Full Clone and cold migrate) to continue seamlessly. This is especially useful for customers leveraging VMware Cloud on AWS as part of their hybrid cloud.

Learn More

As the ideal, efficient, secure universal platform for hybrid cloud, supporting new and existing applications, serving the needs of IT and the business, vSphere 6.7 reinforces your investment in VMware. vSphere 6.7 is one of the core components of VMware’s SDDC and a fundamental building block of your cloud strategy. With vSphere 6.7, you can now run, manage, connect, and secure your applications in a common operating environment, across your hybrid cloud.

This article only touched upon the key highlights of this release, but there are many more new features. To learn more about vSphere 6.7, please see the following resources.

Note:

​As part of any new vSphere release, VMware expects to make compatible versions of dependent products available within one quarter of general availability in most cases. At vSphere 6.7 general availability, compatible versions of VMware NSX, VMware Integrated OpenStack and VMware vSphere Integrated Containers will not be available. Moreover, VMware Horizon 7.4 is not compatible with the Instant Clone API used in vSphere 6.7. Instant Clone support for vSphere 6.7 will be available in an upcoming Horizon release. Existing NSX, VIC and VIO customers are advised not to upgrade to vSphere 6.7 until compatible versions become available. For additional information on NSX, VIC and VIO compatibility, please contact your VMware account team or reseller partner.

I was able to attend VMworld 2018 this year and the talk circled around this upcoming release. It has been a much-anticipated wait for vSphere 6.7 Update 1 release. While we don’t know the exact release date yet (expected date is the end of Q3 2018), we do know the new features and that’s what we’ll dive into for this post. I’ll start by getting to the good stuff and highlighting a list of some of the biggest new features. This release coincides with the announcement of a new VMware licensing tier called vSphere Platinum as well so we will cover that as well.

Biggest new features:

• Fully featured HTML5 web-based vSphere Client
• vMotion for NVIDIA GRID vGPU VMs. Support for Intel FPGA
• vCenter Server Converge Tool to move from external PSC to internal PCS
• Enhancements for vSAN (HCI Updates)
• Enhanced Content Library

vSphere Client is updated!

The vSphere client is the only client you need now. This fixes about 95% of the complaints I was receiving in my classes I ran as a VMware Instructor. A lot of students were very frustrated with having to console hop. Well, no more console hopping! Yes, that is not a typo. VMware has finally managed to move all administrative functions and features to the vSphere Client. They have improved all the functionality in the sections below.

• Improved Search
• Auto Deploy
• Global View
• VM Operations
• VCHA
• Host Profiles
• VUM
• Networking

vMotion for NVIDIA GRID vGPUs

When a vGPU is enabled on a virtual machine, it requires that VM have direct, but shared, access to physical hardware on the system, in this case, a GPU. And vMotion never worked if a VM had direct access to hardware – be it a PCI device that was passed through or something plugged into a USB port.

If we look at how vGPU works, each VM has a shared PCI device added to it. This shared PCI device provides shared access to a physical card. To facilitate this access, each VM gets a portion of the GPU’s Base Address Register (BAR), or the hardware level interface between the machine and the PCI card. In order to make this portable, there has to be some method of virtualizing the BAR. A VM that migrates may not get the same address space on the BAR when it moves to a new host, and any changes to that would likely cause issues to Windows or any jobs that the VM has placed on the GPU. This technical hurdle has finally been overcome.

This update is a huge one in the VDI world and has been a long time in the making. If my memory serves me correctly, I remember seeing and hearing about this at VMworld 2017. I always felt that the technology was held back by the lack of vMotion support. This also opens up new opportunities to better utilize data center resources. If you have a large VDI footprint that utilizes GRID, you can’t vMotion any running desktops today to consolidate them on particular hosts. If you can use vMotion to consolidate these desktops, you can utilize the remaining hosts with GPUs to perform other tasks with GPUs such as turning them into render farms, after-hours data processing with GPUs, or other tasks. This will help minimize business disruptions, improve server density and optimize infrastructure utilization.

vCenter Server Converge Tool

This is another neat update. I will actually dedicate a future post to this tool later. For the folks with separate external Platform Services Controllers, this will be very useful to you if you want to migrate back to an embedded install. I know over the years, I have been an advocate for embedded vCenters, so this helps get you back to that state. To put it simply, this means fewer VMs to manage, no more load balancing for HA, and no complex multi-site replication topologies. In prior versions, you were looking at a rebuild of your infrastructure but this tool will save you from that hassle. The vCenter Server Converge Tool works by installing an embedded PSC on the vCenter Server Appliance and establishing a replication agreement between the embedded PSC and the external PSC. Once this process is finished for all vCenter Servers using a given external PSC, that external PSC can then be removed. The Converge Tool only supports vSphere 6.7 U1 so you’ll have to get your upgrade completed before you can use this tool. The tool itself is launched through a CLI utility called “vcsa-converge-cli” and is included on the VCSA ISO.

vSAN Enhancements

With vSAN Update 1, VMware has introduced new features and enhancements to configure and manage the tools.

Driver & Firmware updates using Update Manager

VMware Update Manager has now been integrated for better and easy operation for your vSAN clusters. All ESXi, driver, and firmware update functions previously handled by the Configuration Assist workflow have been moved to Update Manager. Which puts things into a single pane of glass for the IT Admin finally.

• vSAN can make recommendations to update the drive controller drivers and firmware based on the HCL.
• Custom ISOs for OEM specific builds will be supported and there will be support for vCenter without internet connectivity.
• If any problem has been detected, the upgrade will be halted and the host will remain in maintenance mode.

VSAN Cluster Configuration – Quickstart

vSAN 6.7 Update 1 also introduces a new “quickstart” guided cluster creation wizard gives administrators a streamlined mechanism for deploying vSAN, and non-vSAN, clusters. Not only to create new cluster creation, but it also allows you to add new and existing hosts. It takes some of the complications out of an initial deployment.

It is a very easy and systematic configuration wizard that makes creating a production-ready vSAN cluster effortless. Cluster Quickstart handles initial deployment, as well as the process of expanding the cluster as needs change.

Additional PowerCLI /RVC Changes

VMware is deprecating some things and moving away from RVC and moving more towards PowerCLI to manage vSAN. Some RVC commands have been replaced by PowerCLI cmdlets and added some new cmdlets that are exclusive to the new PowerCLI 10.2. The new version of PowerCLI for vSAN will give you a greater visibility into:

• Cluster configuration info
• Resyncing status
• Health checks
• Object info and status
• vSAN disk stats

Enhanced Content Library

New improvements to the content library in vSphere 6.7 Update 1 enables importing OVA templates from an HTTPS endpoint and local storage. Also, importing verifies the certificate of the OVA bundle. It also now natively supports VM templates (VMTX) and associated operations such as deploying a VM directly from Content Library.

Wrap Up

To conclude, VMware has added several new things and Update 1 is a very worthwhile update. I’ve sometimes felt kind of ‘meh, is it worth updating in the past, but U1 is a must in my book solely for the vSphere Client being fully functional. I will probably take a deeper dive into these topics in future posts, so stay tuned. Let me know in the comments below your thoughts about U1!

Download Altaro VM Backup

Start your free 30-day trial of Altaro VM Backup today and see why it's trusted by 40 000+ organizations worldwide. Get started now and run your first backup in under 15 mins!