VMware vSphere 7.0 Update 1 Released

VMware has released vCenter 7.0 Update 1 and ESXi 7.0 Update 1.

VMware vCenter 7.0 Update 1

What’s new:

• Inclusive terminology: In vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1, as part of a company-wide effort to remove instances of non-inclusive language in our products, the vSphere team has made changes to some of the terms used in the vSphere Client. APIs and CLIs still use legacy terms, but updates are pending in an upcoming release.
• vSphere Accessibility Enhancements: vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1 comes with significant accessibility enhancements based on recommendations by the Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR), which is the internationally accepted standard. Some of the user interface accessibility enhancements are:
  • Accessibility compliance of the vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface
  • Accessibility compliance of the storage management UI, such as the datastore and file browser
  • Capabilities for plug-ins to create accessible UI, such as enhanced structure of dialog screens
  • Enhanced accessibility of other UI components, such as the Content Library, host and cluster management, virtual machine configuration, tasks, events and alarms, network management, and workload management
• vSphere Ideas Portal: With vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1, any user with a valid my.vmware.com account can submit feature requests by using the vSphere Ideas portal. All published ideas are available for voting and the most popular ones might become vSphere features. You can access the vSphere Ideas portal at https://vsphere.ideas.aha.io/ or from the Idea tab under the Feedback section of the vSphere Client. When you log in to the Ideas portal, you are automatically redirected to the my.vmware.com login page for user authentication. After successful login to my.vmware.com, you return to the active session in the vSphere ideas portal. When you log out of the Ideas portal, you are redirected to my.vmware.com to close the session.
• Enhanced vSphere Lifecycle Manager hardware compatibility pre-checks for vSAN environments: vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1 adds vSphere Lifecycle Manager hardware compatibility pre-checks. The pre-checks automatically trigger after certain change events, such as modification of the cluster desired image or addition of a new ESXi host in vSAN environments. Also, the hardware compatibility framework automatically polls the Hardware Compatibility List database at predefined intervals for changes that trigger pre-checks as necessary.
• Increased scalability with vSphere Lifecycle Manager​: With vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1, scalability for vSphere Lifecycle Manager​ operations with ESXi hosts and clusters is up to:
  • 64 supported clusters from 15
  • 96 supported ESXi hosts within a cluster from 64. For vSAN environments, the limit is still 64
  • 280 supported ESXi hosts managed by a vSphere Lifecycle Manager Image from 150
  • 64 clusters on which you can run remediation in parallel, if you initiate remediation at a data center level, from 15
• vSphere Lifecycle Manager support for coordinated upgrades between availability zones: With vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1, to prevent overlapping operations, vSphere Lifecycle Manager updates fault domains in vSAN clusters in a sequence. ESXi hosts within each fault domain are still updated in a rolling fashion. For vSAN stretched clusters, the first fault domain is always the preferred site.
• Extended list of supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu versions for the VMware vSphere Update Manager Download Service (UMDS): vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1 adds new Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu versions that UMDS supports. For the complete list of supported versions, see Supported Linux-Based Operating Systems for Installing UMDS.
• Silence Alerts button in VMware Skyline Health – With vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1, you can stop alerts for certain health checks, such as notifications for known issues, by using the Silence Alerts button. For example, if you do not want to receive notifications from some of the Compute Health Checks, navigate to Skyline Health > Compute Health Checks > name of the Health Check and click the Silence Alert button. In the pop-up window, select YES to disable notifications. Use the button Restore Alert to re-enable the alerts.
• Configure SMTP authentication: vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1 adds support to SMTP authentication in the vCenter Server Appliance to enable sending alerts and alarms by email in secure mode. You can choose between anonymous and authenticated way of sending email alerts. To configure SMTP authentication, you must first complete the steps described in Configure Mail Sender Settings. 
  The mail server name must be smtp.office365.com unless you have some customized configuration. The mail sender name should be the same as the mail.smtp.username property of the smtp user settings.
  To configure the smtp user settings, you must navigate to Advance Settings and set the properties mail.smtp.username to a valid SMTP account name, mail.smtp.password to a valid SMTP account password, and mail.smtp.port to 587.
• System virtual machines for vSphere Cluster Services: In vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1, vSphere Cluster Services adds a set of system virtual machines in every vSphere cluster to ensure the healthy operation of VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler. For more information, see VMware knowledge base articles 80472, 79892 and 80483.
• Licensing for VMware Tanzu Basic: With vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1, licensing for VMware Tanzu Basic splits into separate license keys for vSphere 7 Enterprise Plus and VMware Tanzu Basic. In vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1, you must provide either a vSphere 7 Enterprise Plus license key or a vSphere 7 Enterprise Plus with an add-on for Kubernetes license key to enable the Enterprise Plus functionality for ESXi hosts. In addition, you must provide a VMware Tanzu Basic license key to enable Kubernetes functionality for all ESXi hosts that you want to use as part of a Supervisor Cluster.
  When you upgrade a 7.0 deployment to 7.0 Update 1, existing Supervisor Clusters automatically start a 60-day evaluation mode. If you do not install a VMware Tanzu Basic license key and assign it to existing Supervisor Clusters within 60 days, you see some limitations in the Kubernetes functionality. For more information, see Licensing for vSphere with Tanzu and VMware knowledge base article 80868.
• For VMware vSphere with Kubernetes updates, see VMware vSphere with Kubernetes Release Notes.

See the full release notes here.

VMware ESXi 70.0 Update 1

What’s new:

• ESXi 7.0 Update 1 supports vSphere Quick Boot on the following servers:
  • HPE ProLiant BL460c Gen9
  • HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10 Plus
  • HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen9
  • HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Plus
  • HPE ProLiant XL225n Gen10 Plus
  • HPE Synergy 480 Gen9
• Enhanced vSphere Lifecycle Manager hardware compatibility pre-checks for vSAN environments: ESXi 7.0 Update 1 adds vSphere Lifecycle Manager hardware compatibility pre-checks. The pre-checks automatically trigger after certain change events such as modification of the cluster desired image or addition of a new ESXi host in vSAN environments. Also, the hardware compatibility framework automatically polls the Hardware Compatibility List database at predefined intervals for changes that trigger pre-checks as necessary.
• Increased number of vSphere Lifecycle Manager concurrent operations on clusters: With ESXi 7.0 Update 1, if you initiate remediation at a data center level, the number of clusters on which you can run remediation in parallel, increases from 15 to 64 clusters.
• vSphere Lifecycle Manager support for coordinated updates between availability zones: With ESXi 7.0 Update 1, to prevent overlapping operations, vSphere Lifecycle Manager updates fault domains in vSAN clusters in a sequence. ESXi hosts within each fault domain are still updated in a rolling fashion. For vSAN stretched clusters, the first fault domain is always the preferred site.
• Extended list of supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu versions for the VMware vSphere Update Manager Download Service (UMDS): ESXi 7.0 Update 1 adds new Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu versions that UMDS supports. For the complete list of supported versions, see Supported Linux-Based Operating Systems for Installing UMDS.
• Improved control of VMware Tools time synchronization: With ESXi 7.0 Update 1, you can select a VMware Tools time synchronization mode from the vSphere Client instead of using the command prompt. When you navigate to VM Options > VMware Tools > Synchronize Time with Host, you can select Synchronize at startup and resume (recommended), Synchronize time periodically, or, if no option is selected, you can prevent synchronization.
• Increased Support for Multi-Processor Fault Tolerance (SMP-FT) maximums: With ESXi 7.0 Update 1, you can configure more SMP-FT VMs, and more total SMP-FT vCPUs in an ESXi host, or a cluster, depending on your workloads and capacity planning. 
• Virtual hardware version 18: ESXi Update 7.0 Update 1 introduces virtual hardware version 18 to enable support for virtual machines with higher resource maximums, and:
  • Secure Encrypted Virtualization – Encrypted State (SEV-ES)
  • Virtual remote direct memory access (vRDMA) native endpoints
  • EVC Graphics Mode (vSGA).
• Increased resource maximums for virtual machines and performance enhancements:
  • With ESXi 7.0 Update 1, you can create virtual machines with three times more virtual CPUs and four times more memory to enable applications with larger memory and CPU footprint to scale in an almost linear fashion, comparable with bare metal. Virtual machine resource maximums are up to 768 vCPUs from 256 vCPUs, and to 24 TB of virtual RAM from 6 TB. Still, not over-committing memory remains a best practice. Only virtual machines with hardware version 18 and operating systems supporting such large configurations can be set up with these resource maximums.
  • Performance enhancements in ESXi that support the larger scale of virtual machines include widening of the physical address, address space optimizations, better NUMA awareness for guest virtual machines, and more scalable synchronization techniques. vSphere vMotion is also optimized to work with the larger virtual machine configurations.
  • ESXi hosts with AMD processors can support virtual machines with twice more vCPUs, 256, and up to 8 TB of RAM.
  • Persistent memory (PMEM) support is up twofold to 12 TB from 6 TB for both Memory Mode and App Direct Mode.

Note: customized images and Add-ons packages for HPE, DellEMC and Lenovo is also released for ESXi 7.0 Update 1.

See the full release notes here.