VMware vSphere 6.7 featuring vSAN 6.7 announced!

Posted by Paul Braren on Apr 17 2018 (updated on Apr 27 2018) in

It's a big day! See also virtuallyGhetto's All vSphere 6.7 release notes & download links, but note that not all the links are live quite yet. Meanwhile, VMware has a lot of detail in the press release and technical blog posts ready already. Enjoy!

2:00pm EDT Update - The vSphere 6.7 bits are now available, details here at TinkerTry.

Get started here:

blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/launch

VMware Press Release

VMware Elevates the Hybrid Cloud Experience with New Releases of vSphere and vSAN

Apr 17 2018

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New and enhanced features in VMware vSphere 6.7 will include:

New vCenter Hybrid Linked Mode: Will enable unified visibility and management across different versions of vSphere running on-premises and in the public cloud such as VMware Cloud on AWS, IBM Cloud and other VMware Cloud Provider Program partner clouds. This will allow customers to maintain their current version of vSphere on-premises as needed while enjoying the benefits of new capabilities in vSphere-based public clouds.
New ESXi Single Reboot and vSphere Quick Boot: Will significantly reduce patch and upgrade times by halving the number of reboots required to one, while vSphere Quick Boot will skip hardware initialization steps to gain further re-start efficiencies.
New vSphere Persistent Memory: Will leverage the latest innovation around non-volatile memory and significantly enhance performance for both existing and new apps.
Enhanced NVIDIA GRID vGPUs Support for Modern Workloads: Will improve host lifecycle management and reduce end-user disruption via new suspend and resume capabilities for VMs for GPU-accelerated environments. vSphere 6.7 will enhance support for NVIDIA GRID Virtual PC/Virtual Apps (for knowledge workers) and NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation (for design and engineering professionals) to enable optimal management of VDI workloads as well as enable administrators (admins) to run other NVIDIA GPU-enabled workloads, including AI and ML.
New Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 Support and Virtual TPM 2.0: This combination will significantly enhance protection and integrity for both the hypervisor and the guest operating system (OS). Virtual TPM 2.0 will help prevent VMs and hosts from being tampered or compromised, thwarting the loading of unauthorized components and enable guest OS security features.
Enhanced VMware vSphere Client: This latest release of the HTML-5-based vSphere Client will introduce new functionality to manage VMware NSX, vSAN and vSphere Update Manager along with an increased support for third-party products.
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VMware Technical Articles

You may recall me talking about the RDMA capabilities baked into the latest Xeon Scalable systems and even the recent hotness in IoT, the SoC based Xeon D-2100. By the way, I'll have a loaner Xeon D-2100-based SYS-E300-9D soon, to start some testing out 6.7 on by the end of the month, nice timing! Meanwhile, this article dives right in to RDMA today, in depth, enjoy!

What’s New with VMware vSAN 6.7
Apr 17 2018 07:56am EDT by John Nicholson at VMware Blogs Virtual Blocks

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New HTML5 User Interface Fast, efficient, and consistent
While many customers use CLI and API’s to interact with vSAN, the graphical UI is still the most common day to day management tool. vSAN 6.7 introduces a new HTML5 UI based on the “Clarity” framework as seen in other VMware products. All products in the VMware portfolio are moving toward this UI framework. This interface is more than a simple, direct port from the old vSphere Web Client. VMware took a long look at how tasks and workflows can be optimized and introduced new ways to accomplish tasks more intuitively with fewer clicks. Going forward all new functionality will be delivered in the HTML5 client; however, the legacy vSphere Web Client is still available in this release. The HTML5 UI is a great step forward in providing vSAN users an intuitive and efficient user experience.
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Introducing VMware vSphere 6.7!
Apr 17 2018 07:59am EDT by Himanshu Singh at VMware vSphere Blog

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Moreover, with vSphere 6.7 vCSA delivers phenomenal performance improvements (all metrics compared at cluster scale limits, versus vSphere 6.5):

2X faster performance in vCenter operations per second
3X reduction in memory usage
3X faster DRS-related operations (e.g. power-on virtual machine)
These performance improvements ensure a blazing fast experience for vSphere users, and deliver significant value, as well as time and cost savings in a variety of use cases, such as VDI, Scale-out apps, Big Data, HPC, DevOps, distributed cloud native apps, etc.

vSphere 6.7 improves efficiency at scale when updating ESXi hosts, significantly reducing maintenance time by eliminating one of two reboots normally required for major version upgrades (Single Reboot). In addition to that, vSphere Quick Boot is a new innovation that restarts the ESXi hypervisor without rebooting the physical host, skipping time-consuming hardware initialization.
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introducing-vsphere-6-7-enterprise-applications-cropped2

Introducing vSphere 6.7 for Enterprise Applications
Apr 17 2018 8:04am EDT by Sudhir Balasubramanian at VMware Blogs

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Remote Directory Memory Access
vSphere 6.7 introduces new protocol support for Remote Direct memory Access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet, or RoCE (pronounced “rocky”) v2, a new software Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) adapter, and iSCSI Extension for RDMA (iSER). These features enable customers to integrate with even more high-performance storage systems providing more flexibility to use the hardware that best compliments their workloads.

RDMA support is enhanced with vSphere 6.7 to bring even more performance to enterprise workloads by leveraging kernel and OS bypass reducing latency and dependencies. This is illustrated in the diagram below.

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vspeaking-podcast-episode-75-whats-new-vsan-6-7

vSpeaking Podcast Episode 75: What’s New in vSAN 6.7

vSAN 6.7 is here! This release offers features and capabilities that enable improved performance, usability and consistency. Significant improvements to the management and monitoring tools are also matched by lower level performance and application consistency improvements. This week on the Virtually Speaking Podcast we welcome vSAN expert Myles Gray to walk us through all the features and enhancements.

vSAN continues to see rapid adoption with more than 10,000 customers and growing. A 600 Million dollar run rate was announced for Q4FY2018, and IDC named it the #1 and fastest growing HCI Software Solution.
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What’s new with vSphere 6.7 Core Storage
Apr 17 2018

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Support for PMEM /NVDIMMs

Persistent Memory or PMem is a type of non-volatile DRAM (NVDIMM) that has the speed of DRAM but retains contents through power cycles. It’s a new layer that sits between NAND flash and DRAM providing faster performance and it’s non-volatile unlink DRAM.
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Intel VMD (Volume Management Device)

With vSphere 6.7, there is now native support for Intel VMD technology to enable the management of NMVe drives. This technology was introduced as an installable option in vSphere 6.5. Intel VMD currently enables hot-swap management, as well as NVMe drive, LED control allowing similar control used for SAS and SATA drives.
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Build numbers and versions of VMware vSAN (2150753) | VMware KB
https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2150753

Updated 17.04.2018

vSAN version | ESXi version | ReleaseDate | BuildNumber | vSAN on-disk format version

vSAN 6.7 GA ESXi 6.7 GA 2018-04-17 8169922 6
vSAN 6.6.1 Patch 02 ESXi 6.5 Patch 02 2017-12-19 7388607 5
vSAN 6.6.1 Express Patch 4 ESXi 6.5 Express Patch 4 2017-10-05 6765664 5
vSAN 6.6.1
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More information

Virtual Blocks Blog Posts

Video

From the VMware vSphere YouTube Channel.

Faster Host Upgrades to vSphere 6.7

VMware vSphere 6.7 Quick Boot

From the VMware vSAN YouTube Channel.

vSAN 6.7 Whats New Technical

vSAN 67 Technical Overview

vSAN 6.7 - WSFC support on vSAN!

Join Pete Flecha at vForum Online Spring 2018! I'll be there too with many of my vSAN SE colleagues, helping with the Q&A, come join us on April 18 2018!