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.

Video: High level overview of vSphere with Tanzu

What makes vSphere 7U1 one of the most anticipated releases of vSphere to date is the fact that customers can quickly modernize the 70 million+ workloads running on vSphere today. vSphere with Tanzu is the fastest way to get started with Kubernetes workloads on a developer-ready infrastructure. If you would like to learn more about the benefits and strategic importance of vSphere with Tanzu, please visit our blog written by our CTO Kit Colbert and Product Management executive Jared Rosoff.

In this blog, we will specifically cover the exciting innovations of vSphere 7U1 that enable customers to deliver a developer-ready infrastructure, scale without compromise, and simplify operations.

Deliver Developer-Ready Infrastructure

vSphere with Tanzu offers the ability to configure an enterprise-grade Kubernetes infrastructure leveraging your existing networking and storage in as little as an hour:

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) service: The TKG service allows IT admins to deploy and manage consistent, compliant and conformant Kubernetes runtime environments, while providing developers a simple, fast, self-service provisioning of Tanzu Kubernetes clusters in just a few minutes. TKG being conformant to upstream Kubernetes allows low-friction migration of a container-based application or development environment without refactoring.

Bring Your Own Networking: Customers now have choice in the networks they would like to use for Tanzu Kubernetes clusters. One could use existing networking infrastructure with vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS) centralized interfaces to configure, monitor and administer switching access for VMs and Kubernetes workloads. Networking for Tanzu Kubernetes clusters now is more approachable than ever with the option of using vDS, yet this does not preclude customers from using NSX if they choose to do so. Also, Antrea delivers performance, portability and operations for internal networking of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid service

Bring Your Own Storage: VMware has worked on deep integrations for storage in Kubernetes, to provide persistent storage volume management.  The best way to manage storage in vSphere with Tanzu is to use Storage Policy Based Management, a framework native to storage systems like vSAN and vVol, but for customers not using these capabilities the storage service can provide volumes using any existing block or file-based storage infrastructure.

Bring Your Own Load Balancer: Choose your own L4 load balancing for Tanzu Kubernetes clusters. The first load balancing partner for VMware is HAProxy. While packaged in an OVA format for easy deploy and configuration, commercial support will be offered directly by HAProxy. This new support for different networking options builds a framework by which more partners will be made available in the future, to offer unprecedented choice in network options.

Application-focused management: In the same fashion that IT admins can use vCenter Server tools to manage VMs they can now use vCenter to operate modern applications using namespaces as a unit of management. This is referred to as ‘application focused management’. Using application focused management, IT admins can use vCenter Server to observe and troubleshoot Tanzu Kubernetes clusters alongside VMs, implement role-based access and allocate capacity to developer teams.

For more details on vSphere with Tanzu, please return to the vSphere blog often – we will have a series of blogs and demos showcasing its use.  In the meantime, you can run your own trial of vSphere with Tanzu.  It is an inherent part of vSphere, allowing you to start your trial from any 7u1 installation in record time.

Scale Without Compromise

vSphere continues to deliver the ability to scale your infrastructure to meet the demands of high-performance applications and memory intensive databases including SAP HANA, Epic Operational Databases, InterSystems Caché and IRIS to name a few. Host limits were expanded in vSphere 7 to allow up to 768 CPUs and now with update 1 to support 24TB of RAM.  These new host limits allow unprecedented scale for VMs.

Monster VMs: For customers running SAP HANA, Epic Operational Databases, InterSystems Caché and IRIS, VMware delivers industry leading scale through Monster VMs. With vSphere 7 Update 1, the Monster VM can scale up to 24TB memory and support up to 768 vCPUs, leaving other hypervisor vendors far behind in the category. Monster VMs support the large scale up environments by offering the full resources of a host to individual VMs. This scale was achieved by tuning up the ESXi scheduler and co-scheduling logic for large VMs, removing bottlenecks in vCPU sleep/wakeup paths and reducing memory overhead.

Cluster scale enhancements: As Enterprises scale their cloud infrastructure footprint, the ability to have more hosts per vSphere cluster has never been more critical. With the vSphere 7U1 release, a vSphere cluster can now support a 50% higher number of hosts compared to the previous releases – up to 96 hosts per clusters. These capabilities allow customers to scale their infrastructure without compromise to meet the demands of modern applications.

Simplify Operations

vSphere Lifecycle Manager: vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) was introduced in vSphere 7, and is now enhanced beyond offering LCM for just vSphere and vSAN hosts, extending to include installation and configuration of NSX-T. In vSphere 7 Update 1, vLCM will also monitor for desired image compliance continuously and enable simple remediation in the event of any compliance.

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.

vCenter Connect: As customers scale their on-premises and off-premises cloud infrastructure, customers can manage their VMware Cloud on AWS or other Cloud partner offered vCenter with their on-premises vCenters in a single interface with any to any vCenter Connect capability.

Next Steps

We have keynotes, webcasts and sessions lined up with VMUG Boston UserCon on September 15^th and VMworld 2020 is also around the corner. Register for free and attend both events to learn more.

Attend key events:

• VMUG Boston UserCon (9/15): Watch the Replay of Lee Caswell’s keynote: Modernize millions of workloads using VMware Cloud Platforms
• VMware Webcast (9/15):Up-Level to Developer-Ready Infrastructure to see a LIVE showcase of this VMware vSphere 7 with Tanzu.
• Register for VMworld and immerse into the key sessions for vSphere 7U1.

 Learn more:

• Video: A Quick Look at What’s New in vSphere 7 Update 1
• Video: vSphere with Tanzu Overview in 3 Minutes
• Blog: What’s New with VMware vSphere 7 Update 1
• VMware vSphere with Tanzu webpage
• eBook: Deliver Developer-Ready Infrastructure Using vSphere with Tanzu

• vSphere website
• Follow the vSphere blog for more
• vSphere Academy
• VMUG webcast series

We are excited about these new releases and how vSphere is always improving to serve our customers and workloads better in the hybrid cloud. We will continue posting new technical and product information about vSphere with Tanzu & vSphere 7 Update 1 on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays through the end of October 2020! Join us by following the blog directly using the RSS feed, on Facebook, and on Twitter, and by visiting our YouTube channel which has new videos about vSphere 7 Update 1, too. As always, thank you, and please stay safe.