This post on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution will help you identify the differences between a 6.5 or 6.7 and a 7.0 update 1 vSphere deployment. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution VMware with vSphere 7.0 update 1 was made generally available on March 30, 2021. As the sole proprietor of your VMware SDDC, after deployment, any changes (which there are from 6.x) should be documented because they can have a real operational impact on your day-to-day operations. Oracle customers have complete control over the software lifecycle management of their VMware SDDC. You can select which version of vSphere to deploy at initialization, when to upgrade, and to patch.
Here are the currently available vSphere options and the corresponding vSAN and NSX-T version deployed with the vSphere version chosen.
All the new features and functionality of vSphere 7.0, vSAN 7.0, and NSX-T 3.0 are there by default. I have placed links at the end of this blog post to documentation related to what’s new. So, what is new specifically to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution when deploying vSphere 7.0? The first thing you will find, depending on which version of vSphere you select, is that the minimum size of the SDDC Network will be /22 for 6.5 and 6.7 and a /21 for vSphere 7.0. The subnets allocated for a VMware SDDC consist of a contiguous range of IPv4 addresses that do not overlap with other subnets in the Virtual Cloud Network. Below is a side-by-side comparison of the VLANs when deploying Oracle Cloud VMware Solution with HCX, depending on the vSphere version chosen.
In 6.5 and 6.7, there are not dedicated replication and provisioning VLANs set aside for those use cases. Instead, the management VLAN is used. The second change is that Oracle is taking advantage of a feature, starting with vSphere 7.0 and NSX-T 3.0, where it is possible to deploy a single vSphere Distributed Switch (DVS) and have both DVS created and NSX-T port-groups on the same switch. Take a look at the example below:
vSphere has evolved from using the standard switches, which required individual ESXi host configuration, to a converged virtual distributed switch where both NSX-T and port-groups created on the distributed switch can coexist on a single switch.
- This model decreases management overhead, especially in migration scenarios. From a day-to-day cloud operations standpoint, System administrators will create your VM workload segments in NSX-T in either 6.x or 7.x, so from an operations standpoint, it should be business as usual.
- You will also notice with a single switch vs. two switches, physical uplink redundancy instead of individual ports are allocated to each switch.
Please check out the links below to review what is available in the different software releases from a feature point. The features available are the same as if you deployed on-premises or in Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.
vSphere feature comparison between 6.5, 6.7, and 7.0:
- https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/vsphere/vmw-feature-comparison.pdf
NSX-T 3.0 release notes [version 3.0.2 is a maintenance release]
vSAN 7.0 update 1 release notes:
