Today, we are happy to announce the immediate availability of vSphere 8 Update 2. Customers are welcome to download the software now. As we announced on August 21, this update will help enhance the operational efficiencies of IT admins, supercharge the performance of demanding workloads, and accelerate the pace of innovation for DevOps engineers, developers, and anyone else that can benefit from self-service access to infrastructure services.
10/12/23 Update– vSphere 8 Update 2 has now achieved General Availability status.
Enhance Operational Efficiency
With this latest release, we placed a heavy emphasis on lifecycle management. Updating and upgrading vSphere can sometimes be challenging in large environments because it often extends across the entire on-premises footprint, running on possibly hundreds or thousands of systems. With enhancements, patches, and security fixes coming out regularly, VMware vSphere needs to be quick and easy to update. This release takes a huge leap forward in accomplishing that goal. In addition to lifecycle management, we wanted to make it easier for IT admins to centrally manage authentication by continuing to expand our support for 3rd party identity providers.
Supercharge Workload Performance
With the sensational introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022, there has been an industry-wide surge of interest in generative AI (GenAI). As reported in the press, by January 2023 ChatGPT had become the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users. As a result, GenAI is now a strategic priority for many organizations. vSphere has been on the forefront of AI ever since the introduction of our AI-Ready Enterprise Platform in March 2021, and with this latest release we continue to push the AI envelope by continuing to scale and refine our GPU virtualization technology. Along with AI-related enhancements, we continue to expand the availability of Data Processing Unit (DPU) technology across more hardware platforms so customers can realize these performance benefits.
Accelerate Innovation for DevOps
For infrastructure consumers, such as DevOps engineers or developers, self-service access is paramount. Having to email someone or open a ticket to get access to infrastructure services such as servers, storage, or networking, is a great way to slow things down. Ever since we introduced our Kubernetes integration in 2020, we have continued to raise the bar for self-service access and this release is no exception. In addition to giving infrastructure users faster access, we have also made it easier for IT admins or DevOps engineers to set up their Kubernetes environment.
