Conference fatigue and a quick look at vSphere 7 U1

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We are in the midst of conference season at the moment, and due to Covid they are all online and it’s fair to say I’ve been feeling a bit of conference fatigue recently, if that is such a thing. Over the last few weeks there has been Microsoft Ignite, VMworld, Dell Tech World and other vendors such as Veeam and Barracuda jumping in as well. Whilst it has been great having the chance to attend them all my brain is a little fried. Anyway, with the little capacity I have left for creative writing I’ll have a quick look at some of the features announced in vSphere 7 update 1.

VMware Tanzu

I would have put money on this but it’s great to see VMware Tanzu running directly on vSphere 7 U1 without the need for VCF. Don’t get me wrong VCF is a great platform but not everyone needs this type of platform, and for those who are ready to push ahead with Kubernetes workloads vSphere 7 U1 with Tanzu holds the key to this. There are a lot of BYO, or bring your own, allowing you to use existing storage and networking services when deploying a Kubernetes infrastructure.

Monster VM Support

I’m not quite sure what to say about this, but you can now have VMs with up to 768 vCPU and 24TB RAM configured. I mean these are some pretty big numbers and I would love to have that hardware at my disposal to run these on. Joking aside it really means VMware are committed to supporting those extreme requirements for workloads such as SAP HANA, or Epic operational databases found in large enterprises.

Cluster Size

This has been increased from 64 nodes per cluster up to 96 nodes per cluster. A 50% increase compared to the previous release is quite an achievement.

vSphere Ideas

Personally, I love this. This feature allows you to give feedback directly in the vSphere client UI, helping to build and shape the roadmap of future releases. Not only that, but you also have the ability to see other feature requests and vote on what’s hot and what’s not.

Useful links

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2020/09/whats-new-with-vmware-vsphere-7u1.html