Last week, VMware has announced the future release of VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 3, that means, of course, also the new vSAN 6.7 Update 3 (vSAN is totally integrated in vSphere code).
Unfortunately, has happened in past, this is just a product announce, without provide the code of it and the date of General Availability (GA) release date (but I guess will be on VMworld US 2019). I usually prefer talk about what exist now and see the release notes.
The products are now GA and, most important the hardware compatibility and the software interoperability matrix have been updated!
Note that Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4b is already certified for vSphere 6.7 Update 3!
But note that there are some possible performance issue with vSphere 6.7U3 on Dell servers.
VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 3
The vSphere 6.7 U3 release will be compatible with the 2nd Generation of AMD EPYC processors. Also it will include a lot of new drivers to support recent hardware and platforms.
VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 3 will introduce support for multiple NVIDIA GRID virtual GPUs (vGPU) per virtual machine to enable more graphics and compute intensive workloads running on vSphere.
But the most interesting feature will be the ability to change vCenter Server PNID (Primary Network IDentifier of vCenter Server).
The PNID is the “system name” set in the installer when deploying vCenter Server and usually match the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of the vCenter Server instance (but instead can also be the IP address if no DNS resolution is available.
Until now, was not supported (and not possible in a easy way) to change the PNID in post-installation without redeply the vCenter. With the new release will now finally possible to do it. For more information see Changing your vCenter Server’s FQDN.
VMware vSAN 6.7 Update 3
The new vSAN 6.7 Update 3 will bring tight integration with Cloud Native Application (CNA), especially with Kubernetes through the use of a Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver for vSphere. Persistent volumes used by these applications can be easily managed by a vSphere administrator, just as easily as managing a virtual machine’s virtual disks.
See also this video: Overview of Cloud Native Storage for vSphere 6.7 U3
In the new vSAN there will be a lot of management and UI improvements, including a new vsantop command (that will be similar to esxtop for ESXi or vimtop for VCSA).
Also in the iSCSI part there will be some interesting new features:
- iSCSI LUNs presented from vSAN can now be resized without the need to take the volume offline, preventing application disruption.
- SCSI-3 persistent reservations (SCSI-3 PR) allow for native support for Windows Server Failover Clusters (WSFC) requiring a shared disk.
VMware is also announcing the upcoming release of vSAN Enterprise Plus Edition, a new bundle of vSAN Enterprise and vRealize Operations Advanced licenses.
For more details an all those announces, see also:
- Announcing vSphere 6.7 Update 3
- Announcing vSAN 6.7 Update 3 and Enterprise Plus Edition
- vSAN 6.7 Update 3 – What’s New
PowerCLI 11.4.0
As a final note, also a new release of PowerCLI has been released: PowerCLI 11.4.0.
PowerCLI 11.4.0 comes with the following updates:
- Add support for Horizon View 7.9
- Added new cmdlets to the Storage module
- Updated Storage module cmdlets
- Updated HCX module cmdlets