vSphere 8 Update 1 was released as Initial Availability (IA) on April 18th. The vCenter component was released straight to General Availability (GA) on the same day, April 18th. As of today, ESXi has also now achieved GA.
Hence, today the vSphere team is delighted to announce that we’re switching the vSphere 8 Update 1 designation from IA to GA.
Since the IA was released about three weeks ago there have been a significant number of downloads. From our phone-home telemetry (CEIP), we observed the ESXi IA was installed by the tens of thousands. Considering telemetry only provides a subset of actual deployments (customers are free to opt out), we know that the IA was very widely adopted across our customer base. At that time, zero critical issues were reported. There is a KB article where we would track any critical issues: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/90026
This is the second release where we’ve used this additional mechanism to further demonstrate an additional quality guarantee. Now that vSphere 8 Update 1 is officially GA, there’s a demonstrably wide adoption across a very large and diverse customer base. This extra step is new with vSphere 8 and should help you decide that the GA is ready for deployment in your environment. This will ensure your business is running the best version of vSphere, and start to take advantage of some of the improvements and additional capabilities.
The vSphere 8 Update 1 release brings a plethora of new key features, such as:
