So a couple of new releases landed this week, namely 6.7U3 for vSphere and vSAN. It’s hard to believe that 6.7 has been around for 16 months or so, in my day jobs I still see so many clients running earlier releases, even back to 5.5. As usual I’ll pick my top 3 features from this release with full announcement being found below.

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/08/announcing-vsphere-6-7-update-3.html

vCenter Server PNID

Prior to this release, it was not supported to change the primary network ID of a vCenter server (PNID). Whilst this isn’t a big deal usually it can be pain if you’ve migrated from a Windows based vCenter serer to the VCSA. This process takes the identity of the windows server ,including the name set on install. Some naming conventions make reference to Windows so it’s a bit confusing. So the ability to rename is very welcome. 

Support for AMD EPYC Gen 2

VMware and AMD have recently announced a close collaboration to deliver support for new security features in a future release of vSphere. I’m keeping an eye on how this pans out especially due to the number of CPU exploits we’ve seen over the last couple of years. I can also see AMD single socket becoming popular in for vSAN due to some of the advantages they hold over Intel.

Multiple NVIDIA GPUs

This release allows support for multiple NVIDIA GRID virtual GPUs per virtual machine. This enables greater graphics capability and more compute intensive workloads to run on vSphere. Up to 4 for GPUs can be connected to one virtual machine and allow graphics based applications to improve performance and also speed up machine learning. 

The last word – on upgrading the lab look at this message “Deprecated”

This brought a tear to my eye. Yes it was a tear of joy as I’ve never liked the flash client and will be glad to see it go 🙂