DEVOPSdigest

VMware announced the general availability of VMware vSphere 7, the biggest evolution of vSphere in over a decade.

VMware vSphere 7 has been rearchitected into an open platform using Kubernetes APIs to provide a cloud-like experience for developers and operators.

VMware vSphere 7 delivers essential services for the modern hybrid cloud, powering the compute environments for AI and machine learning, business critical and modern applications.

“Increasingly we see our customers encounter a number of roadblocks and silos when it comes to running their modern and traditional applications,” said Krish Prasad, SVP and GM, Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware. “VMware vSphere 7, our most significant vSphere release in a decade, will help enterprises run all their applications on a common platform using a combination of virtual machines, containers, and Kubernetes. This further helps enterprises increase developer and operator productivity, enabling faster time-to-innovation combined with the necessary enhanced security, stability, and governance.”

With VMware vSphere 7, IT operations teams can expect to benefit from simplified lifecycle management capabilities, new and enhanced security capabilities, new application-focused management, and a unified platform for consistent operations across clouds, data centers, and edge environments.VMware vSphere 7 was tested extensively with approximately 1,000 customers in the beta program.

New capabilities and features include:

- Simplified Lifecycle Management: Using a desired state model, vSphere administrators can create configurations once, apply them, and continue to easily monitor them, protecting against configuration drift. This simplifies lifecycle management, vSphere software patching and firmware upgrades. Customers that prefer restful APIs can also use JSON to automate lifecycle management using VMware vSphere 7.

- Intrinsic Security: Enterprises can further intrinsically secure infrastructure, data, and access with a comprehensive, built-in architecture and a simple, policy-driven model delivered in VMware vSphere 7. This new release introduces remote attestation for sensitive workloads using vSphere Trust Authority. Additionally, it helps secure access and account management using identity federation with Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS).

- Application Acceleration: All applications benefit from a host of VMware vSphere 7 enhancements including major improvements to DRS, enhanced vMotion, and augmented support for persistent memory (PMEM) capabilities. Additionally, AI/ML and other applications can leverage GPU hardware, improving utilization using elastic pools of GPU resources. Further, customers can now support latency-sensitive applications using newly implemented precision time protocol capabilities.

- Support for All Applications: Newly rearchitected using Kubernetes, vSphere is now optimized to run both modern container-based and existing virtual machine-based workloads. Initially, vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, which powers VMware Cloud Foundation Services to increase developer productivity, will be available solely through VMware Cloud Foundation 4.

- Application-Focused Management: Available only in vSphere 7 with Kubernetes (through VMware Cloud Foundation 4), application-focused management enables VI admins to organize multiple objects into a logical group and then apply policies to the entire group. For example, an administrator applies security policies and storage limits to a group of Kubernetes clusters that represent an application versus to all clusters individually.

VMware vSphere 7 comes in two major configurations. VMware vSphere 7 is now available for VM-based applications in a number of editions including VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus Edition.

VMware vSphere with Kubernetes will be available with VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu to power container- and VM-based applications.

VMware Cloud Foundation 4 is expected to become available by May 1, 2020 (the end of VMware’s Q1 Fiscal Year 2021).