VMware vSphere 8 and vSAN 8 Released (IA)

VMware has released VMware vSphere 8 and vSAN 8 as Initial Availability (IA). This also includes vSphere Replication 8.6, VMware Tanzu Kubernetes and vSphere with Tanzu 8.0.

Initial Availability

vSphere 8.0 delivers its Initial Availability (IA) release. The IA release is the first release of vSphere 8.0 and is available to all customers. Custom ISO images that use ESXi 8.0 IA as a base image and include OEM firmware and drivers will be available. IA allows all customers access to the latest production-ready vSphere features as early as possible. Once the vSphere 8.0 IA build becomes broadly available through all channels, such as OEM custom images and our partners’ hardware offerings, VMware plans to designate this build as its General Availability (GA) build.

NOTE: Remember to check al your integrations to VMware vSphere before upgrading to a new Major release.

VMware vSphere 8

What’s new:

• vSphere Distributed Services Engine
  • Introducing vSphere Distributed Services Engine, formerly Project Monterey. vSphere Distributed Services Engine unlocks the power of Data Processing Units (DPUs) for hardware accelerated data processing to improve infrastructure performance, boost infrastructure security and simplify DPU lifecycle management. vSphere 8 makes using DPUs easy for workloads to take advantage of these benefits.
• Lifecycle Management
  • Deprecation Awareness, the baseline from VUM is deprecated, and you should use VLCM features like Cluster image.
  • vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) can stage update payloads
  • vLCM can now remediate multiple hosts in parallel
  • technical preview of vSphere Configuration Profiles
    • This is the new “Host Profile”
  • Enhanced Recovery of vCenter
• AI & ML
  • Device Groups
  • Device Virtualization Extensions builds on Dynamic DirectPath I/O
• Guest OS & Workloads
  • Virtual Hardware Version 20
  • Deploy Windows 11 at Scale
  • Reduce Outages by Preparing Applications for Migration
  • Maximize Performance for Latency Sensitive Workloads
  • Simplified Virtual NUMA Configuration
  • API Driven vSphere and Guest Data Sharing
• Resource Management
  • Enhanced DRS Performance
  • Monitor Energy and Carbon Emissions
• Security & Compliance
  • Prevent execution of untrusted binaries
  • TLS 1.2 only
  • SSH Automatic Timeout
  • Sandboxed Daemons
  • Discontinuation of Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 1.2

See the What’s new Blog here.

See the release notes here.

vSAN 8

What’s new.

• Performance without Tradeoffs
• vSAN Express Storage Architecture
• Increased write buffer
• Native snapshots with minimal performance impact
• Supreme Resource and Space Efficiency
  • Erasure Coding without compromising performance
  • Improved compression
  • Expanded usable storage potential
  • Reduced performance overhead for high VM consolidation
  • HCI Mesh support for 10 client clusters
• Fast, Efficient Data Protection with vSAN ESA Native Snapshots
  • Negligible performance impact
  • Faster snapshot operations
  • Consistent partner backup application experience using VMware VADP
• Availability and Serviceability
  • Simplified and accelerated servicing per device
  • Smaller failure domains and reduced data resynchronization
  • Enhanced data availability and improved SLAs
  • vSAN boot-time optimizations
  • Enhanced shutdown and startup workflows
  • Reduced vSAN File Service failover time
• Intuitive, Agile Operations
  • Consistent interfaces across all vSAN platforms
  • Per-VM policies increase flexibility
  • Proactive Insight into compatibility and compliance
• Additional Features and Enhancement

See the full release notes here.

NOTE: vSAN Express Storage Architecture is available only for new deployments. You cannot upgrade a cluster to vSAN ESA.

vSphere Replication 8.6

What’s new:

• VMware vSphere Replication 8.6 adds compatibility with VMware vSphere 8.0.
• vSphere Replication 8.6 can replicate virtual machines on vSAN Express Storage datastores.
• vSphere Replication 8.6 can replicate DataSets files.
• vSphere Replication 8.6 can support a maximum of 4000 replicated virtual machines per vCenter Server instance with vSphere 8.0 and later and VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC version 1.20 and later.
• The vSphere Replication REST APIs introduce an end-to-end automation for vSphere Replication:
• Configure and reconfigure a replication.
  • REST APIs for monitoring replications, pairings and statuses.
  • Ability to manage vSphere Replication – Start/Stop/Pause/Resume/Delete, with the option to retain replica disks.
  • Full set of REST APIs to configure and manage the vSphere Replication appliance.
  • See this VMware blog for more information.

See the release notes for more information here

VMware Tanzu Kubernetes

See the release notes here.

vSphere with Tanzu 8.0

What’s new:

• Workload Management Configuration Monitoring
• vSphere Zones
• Multi-Cluster Supervisor
• Supervisor Supports Kubernetes 1.23
• Provide consistent network policies with SecurityPolicy CRDs
• vSAN Data Persistence Platform becomes a vSAN Enterprise feature
• Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0
  • ClusterClass
  • Carvel

See the full release notes here.