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Whats New in vSphere 7.0!

It has been a decade I have not published a blog post. So with vSphere 7.0 out in the market, I did not find a better time to start blogging again!

Well vSphere 7.0 has been introduced with a bang. Some fantastic features has been made available.

  • vSphere with Kubernetes (Project Pacific)
  • vCenter Server Profiles
  • vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM)
  • Improved DRS
  • Certificate Management
  • Refactored vMotion

There are other great features apart from what I have mentioned above. But these Six features caught my eye. So lets have a short overview one after the other.

vSphere with Kubernetes (Project Pacific)

This was one of the major announcements made by VMware during the last VMworld where they made their footprint on to the world of containers. Modern applications like micro services requires tools to support and manage infrastructures and vSphere 7 along with VMware cloud foundation provides you such tools in the form of VCF services mentioned below.

  • Tanzu Runtime Services

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid(TKG) intends to provide a consistent experience with Kubernetes irrespective of any underlying infrastructure. TKG offers a great experience to admins as well as developers where developers can self provision these clusters and administrators at the same time have full visibility to the infrastructure and can manage them accordingly.

  • Hybrid Infrastructure Services

Kubernetes workload can make use of the storage(vSAN) and network (NSX) services to rapidly provision POD’s and VM’s accordingly.

The Virtual Machine Service enables VMs to be managed by Kubernetes.  In this model, all components of an application – VMs, containers, and more – can be managed with and through Kubernetes.

  • Application-Focused Management

So with the integration of Kubernetes under vSphere, A vSphere admin will certainly have lot of objects to manage under one roof. An application going forward may not be consisting of One VM.  A logical application can contain multiple POD’s. To ensure developers and admins both can utilize this in a effective manner these group of VM’s POD’s which comprise of one logical application would be grouped under one Kubernetes Namespaces. The admin can mange the namespace directly rather than getting worried about objects that’s underneath. So any policies applied at the namespaces is implicitly applied to all the objects under that Namespace. So developers can easily create or destroy PODs and the policies are applied automatically irrespective new objects being created. This way it can be managed at a better scale for both developers and vSphere admin.

vCenter Server Profiles.

Remember how host profiles in the past made our life easy in context to the host deployment. Once the profile was created using host reference, The same reference profile was applied across all the hosts in the cluster for rapid provisioning.

Don’t you feel it would be helpful if you had something similar for deploying vCenters too. Well vCenter server profiles helps you to achieve that.

vCenter Server profiles basically have their configuration imported and exported via Rest API. These configurations are basically JSON file which can be utilized to deploy new vCenters with similar configuration such has network, management, authentication as well as user configuration.

It is a four step process which is performed via REST API.

  • List                       List the configuration such as mangement, network, User permissions.
  • Export                 Export the configuration files in JSON format.
  • Validate              Validate the configuration against the new vCenter server.
  • Import                Import the profile to the new vCenter.

This feature can be helpful when you have a large environment and you need to build multiple vCenters spanned across different regions

vCenter vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM)

VMware update manager has been replaced by vLCM with the introduction of vSphere 7.0. This feature has really been enhanced as it focusses on much better way of upgrading the vSphere environment.

It mainly ensures to maintain a consistency across ESXI hosts in the cluster. You can have a desired state or single image management wherein a ESXI host not being compliant can be remediated to that desired state. This state can be achieved cluster wide and the upgrade involves firmware management too.  Yes you are reading it right!

You can leverage single downtime to upgrade the Host patches along with the firmware upgrade as vLCM works with vendor management tools like Dell OpenManage and HPE OneView.

It is basically divided into three sections.

  • ESXI Base Image                            This section has the ESXI installer required for the hypervisor
  • Vendor Addons                             Vendor specific Drivers are maintained.
  • Firmware’s & Drivers Addon      Host Firmware’s and Drivers Add ons

Currently this feature is available via GUI as well as rest API.

Improved DRS

Distributed Resource Scheduler has always been one of the good feature introduced by VMware way back in 2006. DRS algorithm was always cluster centric where cluster load was taken into consideration, on basis which VM’s used to be migrated from one host to another if ESXI host witnesses any contention or if cluster observes a certain imbalance.

But with re-designed DRS introduced in vSphere 7.0, DRS would be VM centric instead of cluster centric.

What does this mean?

A couple of metrics such as VM burst size,VM CPU ready time have been leveraged which measures VM “Happiness”. The VM happiness score is taken into consideration before migrating it to a different ESXI host.The ESXI host with maximum VM DRS Score would be chosen instead. In short new DRS stops worrying about ESXI load and instead concentrates on VM load.

Certificate Management

A major relief in this area is number of certificates that needs to be managed has been reduced and new certificate import wizard has been introduced in vsphere 7.0.

Along with that, REST API for renewing certificates has also been made available in order to have a automated approach of such operations going ahead.

Refactored vMotion

vMotion always stayed one of the coolest feature introduced by VMware which involved live migration of VM’s between ESXI hosts. With relatively small VM’s the applications never noticed any changes are being occurred at the hypervisor level as there was mere one packet drop observed during such migrations. But at the same time with the monster workloads such has SAP HANA and oracle database where Memory and CPU is highly allocated, applications/databases did notice some performance issues during the migration process.

The main reason for such performance impact was firstly due to the fact vCPU within VM were leveraged or utilized by a process such as page tracers where vMotion used to keep track of paging activity during migrations along with other activities being performed at the application layer. Longer the migration time more amount of vCPU’s were being leveraged for migration itself. Secondly Memory between the hosts were transferred on 4K pages.

With the introduction of vSphere 7.0 major improvement has been enhanced on vMotion. A dedicated vCPU would be leveraged by page tracer going forward to keep track of the migration without interrupting or overloading other vCPU’s which would be utilized by application themselves.

Memory transfer between hosts would use 1GB pages to ensure the data transfer is much efficient and faster. Since the stun time was always a challenge with larger VM’s rather than transferring the entire memory bitmap at the end which at least was hundreds of MB’s, Only the required pages are transferred. Original transfer almost covered most of the pages, Hence the overall transfer time has been reduced drastically, Optimizing the overall migration time.

Hope the article is was helpful to have a basic understanding. Watch out for more.

Ritesh Shenoy
Hey, My name is Ritesh Shenoy working as a Senior Consultant for SAP. The goal of this blog is to contribute towards VMware community and make ones life better with necessary content in place!

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