VMware vSphere 7.0 Update 1 announced, with vSAN 7 Update 1 featuring HCI Mesh

There's a pattern here. VMware announced VMware vSphere 7 on March 10 2020, and the code went GA and became available for download on April 2, 2020.

This week, VMware vSphere 7.0 Update 1 was announced on September 15, so when can we download it? We'll likely found out for sure soon with VMworld 2020 coming up, but according to vladan.fr, it's expected to become GA (Generally Available) for download by October 30 2020.

Oct 06 2020 Update - It's here! The ESXi 7.0U1 bits became generally available for download today, see release notes and download site, but remember to download VCSA or VAMI update VCSA first! I'm currently testing the ESXCLI command way to update.

There are also many great posts on the vSphere 7.0 Update 1 already, check out much of the coverage at Blog Beat too!

Of course, I'll be testing the final bits home lab Bundle as soon as I can get access to them, then I'll update my popular article with the ESXCLI way of updating to the latest ESXi:

• How to update any VMware ESXi Hypervisor to the latest using ESXCLI for easy download and install

Here's the official announcement:

• What’s New with VMware vSphere 7 Update 1
  Sep 15 2020 by Rajiv Thakkar at VMware vSphere Blog

  Ever since VMware Cloud Foundation with VMware Tanzu was announced in March of 2020, there has been tremendous interest in a single platform for traditional and modern applications. While many customers are ready to deploy the full integrated software stack in VMware Cloud Foundation, many have also been asking us to deliver the capabilities of VMware Tanzu directly on VMware vSphere. These customers may not be quite ready for the full stack, with existing investments in components of the stack that they want to leverage. Today, it gives us immense pleasure to share that VMware has announced vSphere 7 Update 1 to introduce VMware vSphere with VMware Tanzu and many other key innovations.
  ...
  vSphere Ideas: With every release, we continue to shape vSphere’s roadmap with our customer needs. vSphere Ideas is introduced in the latest release so that customers can submit feature requests right from the vSphere Client UI, track the status of the feature requests and look at all the other feature requests submitted by other users to vote for them. vSphere Ideas enables customers to engage and participate in building the roadmap for the product features, thus helping vSphere product teams build the features customers love.
  ...

I'm personally quite happy to see the new vSphere Ideas feature, especially given the challenges I've had with providing product feedback to VMware, how timely! There's so much new in there, check it out!

There will also be a lot more information coming from the VMware Technical Marketing Team at VMware throughout October, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed.

vSAN 7.0 Update 1

These changes are a big deal, and I very much look forward to seeing the many new vSAN capabilities Dell EMC's engineered solution called VxRail.

While I'm pretty sure we'll be hearing much more about the technology at VMworld 2020, meanwhile, here's an excerpt to whet your appetite.

• Announcing VMware vSAN 7 Update 1
  Sep 15 2020 by Teodora Todorova Hristov at VMware Virtual Blocks

  ...
  Scale without compromise with HCI Mesh, Reserved capacity enhancements and Shared Witness

  HCI Mesh is an industry-first, enabling compute and storage disaggregation through software. You can now mount vSAN storage resources across vSAN clusters that share the same vCenter instance and scale seamlessly, using the hardware and software resources you already have in your vSAN datastore. In addition, vSAN 7 Update 1 applies a new method for capacity reservations which frees up additional storage resources. Fixed capacity reservations are no longer applied, and the capacity requirements can decrease dynamically depending on the size of the nodes within a cluster. For example, a 48-node cluster can improve capacity savings up to 18%, resulting in greater resource optimization at lower cost.

  For customers that use vSAN as a ROBO or edge solution, such at retail customers with dozens or hundreds of small deployments,the new shared witness feature will save valuable time and resources. Multiple 2-node vSAN deployments can now share a common witness host virtual appliance. A single shared witness can connect to a maximum of 64 clusters.

  Key enhancements made throughout the stack in both vSAN 7 and vSAN 7 Update 1 led to significant performance improvements. Meaning, lower latency and higher levels of IOPS and throughput. CPU Optimizations, improved parallelization, faster resync operations and network enhancements are part of the reasons to upgrade your vSAN.
  ...

Podcast

Video

See also at TinkerTry

• All vSphere 7 articles

• Get your lab ready for VMware's VMworld 2020, VMUG Advantage is offering TinkerTry readers 15% off throughout September, refer a friend!
  Sep 01 2020

• My VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 3 Upgrade Experience
  Aug 21 2019

• VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 3 Download
  Aug 20 2019

• How to update any VMware ESXi Hypervisor to the latest using ESXCLI for easy download and install
  Aug 14 2018

• The Xeon D Supermicro SuperServer "Bundle 2" of joy, a complete home datacenter virtualization solution that really flies
  Dec 07 2016

• How to use a CyberPower UPS solution for proper automated shutdown of your VMware ESXi lab during power outages, including all VMs
  Nov 27 2012

See also

• vSAN 7 Update 1 What (Else) is new – Networking
  Sep 19 2020 by John Nicholson

  General Performance and monitoring improvements

  As customers move to 25Gbps and 100Gbps switching, further optimizations have been made to the networking stack to increase parallelization of the CPU threads used for networking transport, increasing the efficiency this parallelizations balancing of and reduce overall CPU consumption per thread. These benefits will be most pronounced with RAID 5/6 usage, and multiple disk groups.

• vSphere 7 Update 1 – AMD SEV-ES
  Sep 15 2020 by Bob Plankers at VMware vSphere Blog

  In August 2019 VMware joined AMD on stage as they announced their second generation EPYC server-class CPUs. Together we announced support, in a future release of vSphere, for the AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Secure Encrypted Virtualization – Encrypted State (SEV-ES) advanced security features of those CPUs. vSphere 7 Update 1 keeps our promise, delivering that functionality to customers.
  ...

• vSAN 7.0U1 – What’s new?
  Sep 15 2020 by Cormac Hogan at cormachogan.co

  In vSAN 7.0U1, we are introducing the first version of a Disaggregated vSAN also known as HCI Mesh. This will allow a local vSAN cluster to mount the vSAN datastore from another (remote) vSAN cluster, and vice-versa. This will mean that if there is “stranded space” on some vSAN datastores, this can now be consumed by a remote vSAN cluster, and it can be used for provisioning of virtual machine objects.

• What’s new for vSAN 7.0 U1!?
  Sep 15 2020 by Duncan Epping at yellowbricks.com

  ...
  Let’s just list the key features that have just been announced, and then discuss each of these individually. You better sit down, as this is going to be a long post.
  ...