Announcing vSphere 6.7 Update 3

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We are excited to announce the future release of VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 3. This new vSphere release comes with enhancements that will continue to deliver on our goal of providing a highly performant, efficient and more secure hybrid cloud platform to our partners and customers. Next to various enhancements and driver updates, we again will include new features into this release for simplified operations and increased performance.

Support for multiple NVIDIA® vGPUs

VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 3 will introduce support for multiple NVIDIA GRID virtual GPUs (vGPU) per virtual machine to enable more graphics and compute intensive workloads running on vSphere. You will be able to configure up to four NVIDIA vGPUs connected to one virtual machine. This will enable partners and customers to scale graphics and compute application performance and dramatically speed up machine learning jobs.

AMD EPYC™ Generation 2 support

The vSphere 6.7 U3 release will be compatible with the 2nd Generation of AMD EPYC™ processors. AMD and VMware recently announced a close collaboration to deliver support for new security and other features of the high-performance 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors in a future version of VMware vSphere.

Ability to change vCenter Server PNID

PNID (Primary Network IDentifier of vCenter Server) is the “system name” set in the installer when deploying vCenter Server. The general recommendation is to use the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of the vCenter Server instance. However, when required to change the PNID post-installation, you will be able to do so with this release. Read all about this new feature in this extensive blog post.

vCenter Server 6.7U3

Dynamic DNS support

Dynamic DNS (DDNS) defines a protocol for dynamically updating a DNS server with new data. Prior to Dynamic DNS, administrators were required to manually configure the records stored by DNS servers. When the vCenter Server appliance (VCSA) was installed with a dynamic IP using a DHCP server, and the VCSA IP changes, the DNS records needed to be manually adjusted to make sure the hostname is correctly resolved.

With vSphere 6.7 Update 3, the usage of Dynamic DNS will be supported! As DNS changes are common in customer data centers, the VCSA will have the ability to register itself dynamically on DNS servers.

Driver Enhancements

We are introducing enhancements to VMXNET3. With ESXi 6.7 Update 3, the following is introduced: Guest encapsulation offload and UDP, and ESP RSS support to the Enhanced Networking Stack (ENS). Checksum calculations are offloaded from encapsulated packets to the virtual device emulation and you can run RSS on UDP and ESP packets on demand. The feature requires a corresponding VMXNET3 v4 driver.

Various driver updates will be shipped with 6.7 Update 3. The ixgben driver adds queue pairing to optimize CPU efficiency. The bnxtnet driver will support Broadcom 100 GbE network adapters and multi-RSS feeds. These are just some highlights, the following drivers are updated:

  • VMware nvme
  • Microchip smartpqi
  • Marvell qlnativefc
  • Broadcom lpfc/brcmfcoe
  • Broadcom lsi_msgpt2
  • Broadcom lsi_msgpt35
  • Broadcom lsi_msgpt3
  • Broadcom lsi_mr3
  • Intel i40en
  • Intel ixgben
  • Cisco nenic
  • Broadcom bnxtnet

vSAN 6.7 Update 3

In addition to delivering these improvements to the core platform, vSphere 6.7 Update 3 will provide significant performance enhancements to VMware vSAN. Make sure to read the Announcing vSAN 6.7 Update 3 and Enterprise Plus Edition and the vSAN 6.7 Update 3 – What’s New blog posts.

To Conclude

To learn more about vSphere 6.7 Update 3, visit the product website or try the hands-on labs. You can also reach out to us on Twitter at @VMwarevSphere.