vSphere 8.0 Update 1 and More Released

VMware has released vCenter 8.0 Update, ESXi 8.0 Update 1, vSAN 8.0 Update 1, Replication 8.7 and vSphere with Tanzu 8.0.

With this release VMware has changed the AI/GA Release model for vSphere, the vCenter is released as GA but ESXi is released as IA, for more information se this blog.

vCenter 8.0 Update/ESXi 8.0 Update 1

What’s new:

• vSphere Configuration Profiles (Full support, earlier was Technical Preview)
• With vSphere 8.0 Update 1, vSphere Distributed Services Engine adds support for:
  • NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs to server designs from Lenovo (Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V2).
  • 100G NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs to server designs from Dell.
  • UPTv2 for NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs.
  • AMD Genoa CPU based server designs from Dell
• Support for heterogenous virtual graphics processing unit (vGPU) profiles on the same GPU hardware
• Integration of VMware Skyline™ Health Diagnostics™ with vCenter
• VM-level power consumption metrics
• NVSwitch support
• Okta Identity Federation for vCenter
• Support for Fault Tolerance of virtual machines that use a virtual TPM (vTPM) module
• Quick Boot support for servers with TPM 2.0 chip
• vSphere API for Storage Awareness (VASA) version 5 for vSphere Virtual Volumes
• Sidecar files become regular files in Config-vVol instead of vSphere Virtual Volumes objects
• Increased default capacity for vSphere Virtual Volumes objects of type Config-vVol
• NVMe over TCP support for vSphere Virtual Volumes
• Extended XCOPY support
• New file type for OSDATA volumes on SSD devices
• NFS traffic isolation enhancements
• Fourfold increase in NVMe-oF namespace capacity
• Support for end-to-end NVMe stack without protocol translation
• Increased maximum for Windows Server Failover Clusters (WSFC)
• Scale the number of NVMe over TCP adapters
• Support hot-add and hot-remove for VMDirectPath I/O devices
• Increased number of PCI passthrough devices per VM
• Local depot overrides for Remote Office and Branch Office (ROBO) standalone ESXi hosts
• Advanced filters in the vSphere Client
• Increased maximum number of NFSv3 datastores that can be mounted with multiple connections

See the full vCenter release notes here.

See the full ESXi release notes here.

vSAN 8.0 Update 1

What’s new:

• Disaggregated Storage
  • Disaggregation with vSAN Express Storage Architecture
  • Disaggregation for vSAN stretched clusters (vSAN OSA)
  • Disaggregation across clusters using multiple vCenter Servers (vSAN OSA)
• Optimized Performance, Durability, and Flexibility
  • Improved performance with new Adaptive Write Path
  • Optimized I/O processing for single VMDK/objects (vSAN ESA)
  • Enhanced durability in maintenance mode scenarios
  • Increased administrative storage capacity on vSAN datastores using customizable namespace objects
  • Witness appliance certification
• Simplified Management
  • Auto-policy management for the default storage policy (vSAN ESA)
  • Skyline health intelligent cluster health scoring, diagnostics and remediation
  • High resolution performance monitoring in vSAN performance service
  • VM I/O trip analyzer task scheduling
  • PowerCLI enhancements
• Cloud Native Storage
  • Cloud Native Support for TKGs and supervisor clusters (vSAN ESA)
  • Data Persistence platform support using common vSphere switching
  • Thick provisioning for persistent volumes using SPBM on VMFS datastores (VMware vSAN Direct Configuration

See the full release notes here.

vSphere Replication 8.7

What’s new:

• VMware vSphere Replication 8.7 adds compatibility with VMware vSphere 8.0 Update 1.
• Enhancement to Datagrid user interface:
  • Display of more object lines per page based on the toggle control. Flexibility in selection of maximum records to be displayed.
  • Option to autofit columns with the data.
  • Ability to remember the column resizing.
• Exclusion of ESXi host from registration based on the ESXi host tag.
• Additional option to retain replica base disks in the replication reconfigure wizard when excluding a disk from the replication.
• Datastore cluster as a target for the replication.
• New REST APIs for configuration of vSphere Replication.For more information, see the blog.
• New option to start or restart the syslog services through the VRMS Appliance Management Interface.

See the full release notes here.

vSphere with Tanzu 8.0

What’s new:

• Supervisor
  • Supervisor Services are now available on VDS based Supervisors
  • VM Service Support for all Linux Images
  • Web-Console Support for VM Service VMs
• Tanzu Kubernetes Grid for vSphere
  • Custom cluster class
  • Custom image for TKG node

See the full release notes here.