A year and a half ago, we introduced VMware vSphere® 7 to help customers deliver AI and developer-ready infrastructure, scale without compromise, and simplify operations. We’ve continued delivering and adding key capabilities in those focus areas over the past two update releases, as well as various minor releases. Today, we’re excited to introduce vSphere 7 Update 3 which continues to enhance the industry’s leading virtualization and workload platform to add more value for customers in these key areas. vSphere 7 Update 3 is generally available now.
Deliver AI and Developer-Ready Infrastructure
To help customers deliver AI- and developer-ready infrastructure, we have enhanced the Virtual Machine (VM) Service which we introduced in Update 2a last April. With vSphere 7 Update 3, developers and DevOps teams will be able to use Kubernetes commands to provision VMs on hosts with vGPUs. This will help customers build and run their AI apps on GPU-enabled hardware using a self-service model. When combined with all the GPU-related enhancements we introduced in vSphere 7 Update 2, customers will have a lot of power at their fingertips.
We also listened to our customers and simplified the setup of VMwarevSphere® with VMware Tanzu™, especially on the network side. Now you can get a test bed up and running with a fraction of the effort so you can focus more on learning how vSphere can operate as your Kubernetes platform.
Scale without Compromise
Large-scale systems using persistent memory have continued to increase in importance, led by apps built on platforms such as SAP HANA®. We have continued to enhance our support for persistent memory, and with vSphere 7 Update 3 we have made it a lot easier to analyze and tune performance by providing insights into memory bandwidth and usage. In addition, alarms can be setup based on SLAs and remediation can be performed based on these findings.
As flash and SSD storage continue to grow in popularity, so does the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) transport standard designed for nonvolatile storage systems. With vSphere 7 Update 3, we are adding support for NVMe over TCP which allows ubiquitous TCP/IP networking infrastructure to be utilized for storage traffic that is better optimized for flash and SSD. With this advancement, organizations can achieve higher performance and lower latency at a reduced cost. To learn more about this announcement and our related partnerships, read this blog.
Simplify Operations
By leveraging our network and security virtualization platform, VMware NSX®, you can connect and protect applications across your entire IT environment. With vSphere 7 Update 3 we are introducing a vCenter Server plug-in for NSX that will make it much easier for vSphere admins to setup and use NSX networking and security from within the vSphere client, without the need to navigate and login again to the NSX Manager. Customers will enjoy a greatly simplified installation workflow and setup of NSX-T and seamless user authentication between vSphere and NSX-T. Note that this enhancement requires a license of an upcoming release of VMware NSX-T.
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Finally, we have improved the vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) to be smarter in how it handles maintenance operations. Larger or more critical workloads will now be moved as little as possible, reducing the possibility of disruption that users may experience during maintenance and upgrades.
Next Steps
VMware vSphere 7 Update 3 is generally available now! This article highlights the key capabilities in the release, but there are many more enhancements to learn about.
What better way to learn more about vSphere 7 Update 3 (and much more in vSphere news) than at VMworld next week! We will have several VMworld sessions that dig into the details of some of these enhancements as well as the future of vSphere. So join us next week, and don’t miss these sessions:
