We are excited to announce the initial availability of vSphere 8, now available for download. This is a production quality major release with massive improvements that bring the benefits of cloud to on-premises workloads, supercharge performance through DPUs and GPUs, and accelerate innovation with an enterprise-ready integrated Kubernetes runtime. Read more on the new release model for vSphere releases going forward.
With vSphere 8, enterprises can supercharge workload performance by offloading and accelerating network infrastructure services, such as VMware NSX, on the DPU. This is just the beginning as VMware plans to offload and accelerate more infrastructure services in the future. vSphere 8 provides customers the choice of server solutions from Dell Technologies and HPE based on DPU technologies from NVIDIA and AMD/Pensando. vSphere 8 makes it a breeze to introduce DPUs in the to your infrastructure. It reduces the operational burden of managing the lifecycle of DPUs by leveraging existing tools and established workflows.
Previous releases of vSphere have made major strides in making GPUs both accessible and scalable for AI/ML workloads. vSphere 8 takes these advancements one step further by supporting 8 vGPUs and 32 passthrough devices per VM.
vSphere 7 introduced the ability to manage containers alongside VMs, allowing enterprises to modernize applications at a convenient pace. vSphere 8 adds several advancements that help DevOps teams innovate faster. vSphere 8 introduces the Cloud Consumption Interface – a simple and intuitive self-service web and API interface which enables DevOps teams to access and provision IaaS services.
vSphere 8 comes with built in support for VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0 and helps developers tackle the growing complexity of deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters. TKG 2.0 now supports ClusterClass, a declarative Cluster API that standardizes the process to provision, upgrade and operate multiple Kubernetes clusters.
TKG streamlines authentication across Kubernetes clusters. Pinniped supports LDAP and OIDC federated authentication. You can define identity providers that can be used to authenticate users to the supervisor clusters and Tanzu Kubernetes clusters.
vSphere 8 pre-stages ESXi image downloads prior to the commencement of maintenance windows. This cuts down the overall maintenance window by the time it takes to download huge image files. Additionally, remediation can now be performed in parallel with more than one host. These enhancements shrink maintenance windows, allowing IT teams to return to normal operations quicker than before.
vSphere 8 gives a major upgrade to DRS and vMotion when PMEM is present on a host by leveraging memory stats to optimally place VMs.
VMware announced the availability of vSphere+ in July of this year, a new offering from the vSphere family which combines industry leading virtualization technology with high value cloud services that transform existing on-premises infrastructure in-place with cloud benefits. With vSphere 8, customers can truly bring the best-in-class on-premises infrastructure and VMware cloud services in a seamless manner, without requiring any lift and shift of workloads.
