Just a couple of months after the release of vSphere 6.7 Update 1, VMware today announced a new update to its vSphere platform in the form of vSphere 6.7 Update 2. This new update brings a lot of enhancements and new features to the table that will provide the users with rich capabilities and ease the management of their cloud environments!
So lets get started;
vSphere 6.7 Update 2
With vSphere 6.7 Update 2, VMware announced the deprecation of the external PSC! Yes you’ve heard that right! The dear external PSC’s we’ve build are going to deprecated. But fear not, VMware created the VMware vCenter Converge Tool to help everybody converge their vCenter and PSC topologies to the embedded PSC’s. You can even migrate/converge from within the vCenter UI! A nifty extra feature is that you can also decommission your old PSC’s right from the UI!
For those that don’t remember anymore. Previously you had to have an external PSC to make use of Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM) to have multiple vCenters in the same SSO domain. Since vSphere 6.7 Update 1 VMware also supports the embedded PSC’s for this functionality. So there basically isn’t any need for the external PSC’s anymore.
There are also some new maximums that can give a virtual machine up to 256 vCPU’s and 6TB of RAM so that enterprise applications such as SAP HANA can also use vSphere for the virtualization of database intensive applications.
VMware also mentioned customers who are using Intel Skylake or older processors continue to rely on the hypervisors or operating systems to protect against the L1TF security vulnerability. But some improvements have been made to the scheduler that “recaptures performance impacted by the vulnerability”. Looking forward to what that means.
Another thing I found is that the vmxnet3 drivers can now be installed through Windows update on Windows Server 2019, which is nice and might prevent a reboot.
vCenter Appliance backups can now be done to SMB and NFS v3 shares in addition to FTP(S), HTTP(S) or SCP targets. The vCenter Appliance also received some new alarms to monitor the backups, which is quite useful to have and know right?
The vSphere Health section has expanded and has some new health categories so that the health of the environment can be monitored more closely.
The most awesome new addition is that Code Capture is available in the Web client and is not longer a fling. I will do some blog posts of this once it’s released!
Last thing I want to mention about the vSphere update is that there are some enhancements in the UI for VUM. Attaching, checking and remediating is now in one screen instead of multiple. You can also enable Quick boot, disconnect removable devices and skip vSAN Healthchecks.
vSphere Platinum updates
VMware announced several new capabilities to AppDefense with this release. New scope dashboards, increased granularity for monitoring and event classification, and automatically adapting to security events to reduce false positives which is a pain for the VI admins.
NEW! vSphere ROBO Enterprise
New functionality has been added to the vSphere ROBO solutions. In addition to vSphere ROBO standard and advanced VMware announced the enterprise version. In this version you can use DRS for Maintenance mode so that you can patch hosts. This works by using automated VM-Host affinity rules which keep track of the migrations and move the virtual machines back once patching has finished. Also new is VM Encryption to make sure all your virtual machines are encrypted. Just as you could in the normal vSphere environments (that have the correct license).
This is just a small summary of the enhancements and new features that are going to be in the new vSphere 6.7 Update 2 version. Please read up on more on the VMware blog here.
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