Introduction to vSphere 7 Improvements
As vSphere 7 is available right now on VMware portal and customers can try it right now, so here are some insights about the enhancements in vSphere 7 for better understanding.
Major changes:
1- Introduces VMware vSphere Lifecycle manager (VLM) instead of vSphere Update Manager (VUM) which will include enhancements in the lifecycle management processes and will also include a precheck capability tests before upgrades which will enable you to identify all issues that could be an obstacle to the upgrades before proceeding with them.
For more info kindly check: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vsphere-lifecycle-manager.doc/GUID-74295A37-E8BB-4EB9-BFBA-47B78F0C570D.html and https://tinkertry.com/how-to-upgrade-from-vsphere-6-7-to-7
2- VSAN 7 supports native file services instead of using external NAS systems, but NAS devices performance will be better for sure as this is the 1st release.
For more info Kindly check: https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2020/03/10/announcing-vsan-7/
3- vSphere 7 operates with embedded PSC only in Center server appliance which mean we will only have 1 vCenter VM and PSC services will be included there.
For more info kindly check: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2020/03/vsphere-7-vcenter-server-7-migration-upgrades.html
4- Windows vCenter server will be deprecated and there is no longer an installer for vCenter Server for Windows
For more info kindly check: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2020/03/vsphere-7-vcenter-server-7-migration-upgrades.html
5- Upgrade to vSphere 7 will be supported only from vSphere 6.5 and 6.7 but previous versions like vSphere 6.0 will need two steps upgrade.
For more info kindly check: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2020/03/vsphere-7-vcenter-server-7-migration-upgrades.html
6- DRS improvement: Before DRS used a cluster-centric model which means it ensures that the load between ESXi hosts is almost equally distributed and if not it will start migrating VMs using vmotion to equalize the load across hosts, but now vSphere 7 will focus on a parameter called virtual machine happiness, it will be a VM-centric approach where DRS decisions will be based upon migrating the VM to another host that has more available resources to it, as it computes a VM DRS score on each host and moves the VM to the host that provides the highest VM DRS score. DRS check used to happen every 5 mins to stabilize the cluster, with vSphere 7 the check will be done every 1 min.
For more info kindly check: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2020/03/vsphere-7-improved-drs.html
7- vmotion improvement:
How vmotion works?
Previously vmotion process was happening based on copying the virtual memory of the VM from the source host to the destination host and monitor all the changes that happened during this migration on all vCPUs using the page tracing process to understand what memory pages are being overwritten to apply these changes to the virtual memory on the destination host.
What issue we needed to fix?
Great performance degradation issue while migrating monster VMs because what happens is that the big chunk of the virtual memory could be big like 4TB and this will take time for sure to be copied, and while copying process is carried out the guest OS of the VM will keep writing data on the virtual memory which could be big as well.
vmotion keeps tracking of the changed memory pages in the source host by installing a page tracer process on all the vCPUs that are configured for the VM. By doing so, vmotion understands what memory pages are being overwritten. But this arises an issue which is to install the page tracer process on all vCPUs, the vCPUs are briefly stopped. It’s only microseconds, but stopping all vCPUs disrupts the workload. Also those changes in memory pages would be large as well so to be able to apply these big changes by vmotion on the destination host this will cause a performance degradation issue which will be inevitable.
What is the enhancement of vmotion in vSphere 7?
We now only claim one vCPU to perform all the tracing work instead of claiming all the vCPUs of VM. All the other vCPUs that are entitled to the VM just continue to run the workload without interruption.
For more info kindly check: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2020/03/vsphere-7-vmotion-enhancements.html
8- License Keys will need to be upgraded from my.vmware.com portal as old ones will not work with vSphere 7.
For more info kindly check: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2006974
9- VCF 4 will be supported over VxRail which will integrate SDDC manager to manage clusters beside vSphere web client where it provides an orchestration layer on the level of datacenter.
For more info kindly check: https://vmusketeers.com/2020/03/10/vcf4-vsphere-7-vsan7-vrops-8-1-and-everything-else/
10- VCF 4 supports integration with Kubernetes to deploy containers; that's a cool feature for the customers as operation teams usually are the only teams that have access to the vcenter and creating workloads on clusters etc., and when development teams needs to create a workload to test their codes they have two options:
- They will need a partial access to vcenter to make these workloads.
- They will request the workloads to be created by the operation teams and then get access to these workloads to start deploying their codes and test them.
Which represents a great hassle and a time consuming process for the integration between both teams, but with this support to Kubernetes services, operation team can deploy something called supervisor cluster that enables Kubernetes over VCF to start deploying containers and VMs over the same hosts by the development teams as they wish without the need to access vCenter itself and other clusters.
Kindly note that:
- You can enable Kubernetes on specific clusters and disable it on the rest, as you wish.
- Kubernetes can be only enabled on VCF 4 clusters so far to be enabled on the level of the ESXi hosts themselves and the vcenter server.
For more info kindly check: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2020/04/how-to-get-vsphere-with-kubernetes.html and https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2020/03/vsphere-7-tanzu-kubernetes-clusters.html
11- Containers can work with VMs on the same cluster and will have the same capabilities like VMs such as HA, FT, vmotion, ... etc.
For more info kindly check: https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/03/10/vmware-vsphere-7-kubernetes/
12- Supporting for multi-homing capability which means that we will be able to configure VCSA with multiple NICs, some customers needed this to dedicate a backup network for example of VCSA or dedicate a management layer through a jump host on the public side. vSphere 7 supports to assign up to 4 NICs to VCSA.
For more info kindly check: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kFZXa9lloM and https://www.vladan.fr/what-is-vcenter-server-7-multi-homing/
Thank you for reading and kindly reach out to me if you needed any clarification.