You may have noticed the release of vSphere 7 Update 2. As always, there is an extensive list of updates, covering various product areas, and I am sure you’ll get to read all about them in the release notes. This blog is about my picks from them that I feel need more of your attention.
vSphere with Tanzu Integrated Load Balancing
It was important that VMware made vSphere with Tanzu available as there are many organisations that still operate on the classic vSphere model and don’t have VMware Cloud Foundations (VCF) or even NSX running. It works with vSphere Distributed Switches and made Tanzu available for those deployments as well.
However, load-balancing was missing from that model and to provide that important function, HA Proxy-based load-balancing was made available.
Now with vSphere 7 Update 2, “NSX Advanced Load Balancer Essentials” fills that gap. Orchestrated through the network service and NSX-T, it provides a highly available and scalable load-balancing environment to vSphere with Tanzu, TKG Cluster Control plane and as ingress for Kubernetes load balancer services. Best of all, it is fully supported, upgraded, and lifecycle managed automatically.
NVIDIA Multi-Instance GPU (MIG)
Late last year, Nvidia released the new Ampere Architecture based GPUs with great fanfare (and shortages thereafter!) It was long anticipated by not only hardcore gamers but also data scientists and AI/ML enthusiasts worldwide, who were waiting to take advantage of the third generation of Tensor Cores and accelerate AI training without any changes to the code.
As you would expect, vSphere 7 update 2 brings support for Ampere architecture. One should bear in mind that it’s for AI/ML workloads in this instance and not graphics. What I find more valuable is the true multi-instance GPU with vSphere 7 update 2.
If you don’t already know, vSphere already has vGPU capabilities, which means that multiple VMs can have their own virtual GPU devices that can leverage GPU services from one physical GPU. However, that capability is provided by slicing GPU memory and there’s no isolation of cache or streaming multiprocessors between the different workloads.
That changes with vSphere 7 update 2. With the architecture enhancements introduced, each GPU instance profile gets its own slice of GPU with a complete set of allocated resources of screen buffer, cache and CUDA cores. That translates into more predictable performance and workload isolation.
ESXi Suspend-to-Memory
As I was trying to pick my favourite from the lifecycle enhancements for vSphere 7 update 2, I was wrestling between this and “vLCM Desired Image Seeding” (which extracts an image from an existing “good” host – to allow imports on to secure/air-gapped hosts) which is also great. In the end, I picked this one as more hosts worldwide can potentially benefit from ESXi Suspend-to-Memory.
“Quick boot” has been around for a while now in vSphere (since 6.7) and helps shorten downtimes by only rebooting the ESXi kernel (when supported by the host’s hardware and configuration for Quick Boot). Previously, it was used with the “Do not change power state” (default – vMotions VM workloads to other hosts) option or with “Suspend to disk” where VMs on those hosts were suspended to disk and resumed once the host was back from the reboot of the ESXi kernel.
Now with vSphere 7 update 2, admins can choose “Suspend to memory”, which saves the contents of the VM to memory, while the ESXi kernel reboots. At first glance, it might not look as ground-breaking in terms of time saved but consider that memory is much faster than disk and hosts of today can have multiple terabytes worth of VMs on each one of them.
Suspension of all those VMs to disk requires writing terabytes of data to disk first and then reading it all back once the host is functional again which still consumes a considerable amount of time. Also, that’s another few terabytes that one must keep free on the disk.
To me, that could potentially be a huge benefit to admins all over and as they say – every little (time saved) helps!
vMotion Auto Scale
All VMware fans must like whatever enhancement is revealed when it comes to vMotion – that’s a rule and there are no exceptions! So, when we are told that with vSphere 7 update 2, vMotion gets the capability to auto-scale the number of streams to match available bandwidth, what’s there not to like!
Seriously though, when you think that there isn’t much that VMware can do to enhance vMotion, it comes out with yet another feature. As we know 25 GbE networking is now pretty much mainstream (with 40 and 100 GbE also gathering momentum) so surely, vMotion should adapt to take advantage of the availability of that bandwidth as and when it becomes available, which isn’t that easy when tuned manually.
It helps not only with day-to-day DRS rebalancing operations but also when used with Quick Boot (when the requirement is to keep the VMs running), it can reduce reboot times significantly. That makes it one of those features that I wanted to highlight in this post.
vSphere Native Key Provider
Finally, I just couldn’t finish this piece without talking about this new feature. There are companies all over, especially smaller ones, that wholeheartedly want to implement encryption throughout their vSphere deployment but find implementing a full-blown external KMS system too expensive and/or cumbersome for their liking.
Enter vSphere Native Key Provider! It works with ESXi Key Persistence to provide the ability to add a “Native Key Provider” to a vSphere 7 update 2 deployment. Once enabled, it allows enablement of vSAN Encryption, VM Encryption and vTPM.
Granted KMS functionality it’s not as full-featured as your typical KMS deployment but if the goal is to provide encryption to your vSphere infrastructure simply and quickly, this is the perfect solution and will no doubt accelerate the adoption of encryption in vSphere environments.
I’ll repeat that there are many more updates that came with this release so please do remember to go and check out the release notes. This post lists my picks for the most impactful updates amongst them and why.
This post is getting long so for all the new and enhanced vSAN 7 Update 2 features, see my other post!
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