vSphere 6.5 & 6.7 – End of General Support
Why do I keep posting this?
I do not want anyone to be surprised….
Don’t forget that vSphere 6 is phasing out, and that most people should be moving to vSphere 7.
Customer buying new hardware, & asking for ESXi 6.5 installs are being met with surprises, as the hardware doesn’t support ESXi 6.5…..forcing the upgrade path.
So far, vSphere 7.0.3 Update 3f (July release) seems to be very stable.
vSphere 6.5 & 6.7 End Of General Support ends October 15, 2022
This only leaves 1.5 weeks to get to vSphere 7.
….& vSphere 8 was just recently announced & should be available next week…
VMware End of Support pages are here.
Don’t forget that SD cards are no longer recommended by VMware!
That means you need SSD or NVMe for boot drives now!
vSphere 8 release date – October 11 ??
VMware Blog post is here (short & sweet)….pulled the moment I linked to it…..
…did they release the post a few days early?….
Already booked a few days to read the documentation, & inject the content into the WEI vSphere Workshops!!!
Will take an extra few days to validate our upgrade documentation, as well as the new deploy documentation. We’ll be able to teach probably 2 weeks afterwards, barring any major issues.
….meaning all things I’ve discovered (below) might not make GA, but we’ll see.
vMotion Improvements in vSphere 8
Couple of new concepts here….
vMotion In App Notifications (postpone the vMotion till the app is ready)
vMotion Unified Data Transport.
Check them out, pretty cool capability
Niels Hagoort’s post is here.
VM Service CloudInit transport for vSphere 8 with Tanzu
Essentially, how to get Tanzu to deploy a non-VMware deployed (or VM Marketplace) VM image (OVA) to deploy via Tanzu.
Your VMs just need to support Cloud-Init 21.3 or later.
Great post by William Lam is here.
VM Metadata Service in vSphere 8
Why does William Lam always get mentioned…… 😉
To me, this sounds like a way to extend Tags & Categories to an OVF (though that’s not the way it works in reality).
Guest OS commands? ….I’m curious.
Check out the post here…its lengthy, but covers a lot.
New VMX Version – v20
Found this in the above lined post from William Lam.
New vSphere Compatibility (or VMX version) of 20 is coming with vSphere 8.
vmx.reboot.powerpolicy now part of vSphere 8
Three years ago, Bob Plankers did a post about this capability added in vSphere 6.5/6.7 (and of course vSphere 7).
Solved some challenges with coordinating power-off and power-on of a VM…which to take advantage of new EVC, or reload the VMX file…required coordination with the application team.
That VMX setting made it a non issue.
William Lam’s latest post shows how this in now part of the vSphere 8 GUI.
vSphere 8 – making Vendor Custom ISOs
With the change from Update Manger to vSphere Lifecycle Manager…
Looks like VMware is committing to this change in the way you patch & update your VMware vSphere Clusters.
All clusters must be the same hardware vendor.
All cluster servers must be able to utilize the same (support pack) bundle of drivers and firmware.
Why?
vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) applies a single image to all servers in a VMware Cluster….a single image!…that means there are new constraints around mixing in different hardware within a cluster.
It’s been a best practice since day 1 of VMware Clusters (around 2004, I think)…
Well, now its going to be a constraint to how you add/create your VMware Cluster, and the nodes that can be placed into that cluster.
As I’ve always tried to lead in that direction for designing clusters, should be no issue for a lot of folks…
So what’s with this long statement around this topic?
The ISO you download for ESXi should match your hardware vendor (if available)….wonder if these will not be available anymore, as we can create our own.
Looks like William Lam is giving a preview of how this is going to work moving forward, as Image Builder appears to be builtin to vSphere 8 vLCM.
Check out his post here.
VMware Validate Solutions – now with PowerShell
I thought these were called VVD (VMware Validated Designs)? oh well.
The latest VMware Blog post highlighted a few new VVS, but what caught my eye, is the addition of PowerValidatedSolutions (PowerShell/PowerCLI code)
Import/Export settings for Resource Pools
Not something I do very often, but figured I capture this here.
Danny Alvarez captured this for the same reason I capture things here…
Check out his post here showing how this is done in modern version of vSphere.
NUMA & Sub-NUMA clustering
A take by by Frank Denneman.
Given his published works, he’s kind of the go to on this topic.
Check out his post here.
CPUs over the Generations – a cool take
Found this (via William Lam) cook take on CPUs.
The journey since mainframes to the current day, & a possible take on the future of CPUs in the datacenter.
The post is here.
Nutanix License Portability
This has been getting some attention lately…
The ability to move your on-prem licenses to a public cloud provider.
Nutanix licensing can be applied to any CPUs (cores) wherever you happen to be running the Nutanix AOS .
Nutanix Blog post is here, reiterating this license portability.
Nutanix VirtIO 1.2.1 released
The core drivers for Windows devices on AHV VMs.
Support for the vTPM (required for Windows 11).
Download is here.
Release Notes are here.
Nutanix & Windows 11
Artur Krzywdzinski posted a short notice about this.
While it is enabled in AOS 6.5.1, right now its CLI only.
GUI (Prism) integration is coming in the next revision.
vTPM will probably be new to most of us, but its just another device for a VM.
Windows 11 might the first template I build with 2 x vCPUs….
Continuing Education – a list of resources that come with references
(of people who have used those sites & are happy with the results).
VMware Explore 2022 Europe – November 7 – November 11
HashiCorp Learn
Kode Kloud
KubeAcademy
Nutanix University
PluralSight / A Cloud Guru (PluralSight purchased A Cloud Guru)
Udemy
vBrownBag
VMware Customer Connect Learning (old VMware Learning Zone)
VMware Hands On Labs
VMware Explore 2022 (sessions)
VMware Explore VMTN Sessions (vBrownBag)
VCDX Mentoring Series