vSphere 7 Key Capabilities and Features

Posted in VMWARE by nkcode On March 20, 2020. No comments

vSphere 7 delivers the essential services for the modern hybrid cloud. It powers the computing environment for modern applications, AI/ML, and business-critical applications. Applications can be deployed using any combination of virtual machines, containers, and Kubernetes. vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, available through VMware Cloud Foundation, delivers VMware Cloud Foundation Services and application-focused management for a streamlined development, agile operations, and accelerated innovation.

vSphere 7 powers VMware Cloud Foundation, which enables customers to deliver apps to any cloud while ensuring security, performance, and resiliency. vSphere 7 and VMware Cloud Foundation improve the security, performance, and resiliency of your infrastructure as you accelerate your digital transformation journey without incurring big disruptions to your people, process and technology investments.

Key capabilities of vSphere 7

Simplified Lifecycle Management

When you start providing infrastructure services with a cloud consumption model, it is critical to have a solution that allows you to fully automate and simplify the lifecycle management of the infrastructure software and hardware firmware. vSphere 7 introduces the next generation of the vSphere Lifecycle Manager and Update Planner. It allows you to seamlessly manage the lifecycle of the infrastructure using the desired state paradigm. Besides, vCenter Server profiles are added to provided desired state configuration management for vCenter Server instances.

Intrinsic Security and Control

Security is always important, regardless of whether you are running in your data center or a cloud. With vSphere 7, you now can better secure infrastructure, data, and access with a simple, comprehensive, and policy-driven model. vSphere 7 introduces remote attestation for sensitive workloads using the new vSphere Trust Authority. Moreover, it can provide secure vCenter Server authentication using an external Identity Federation. vSphere 7 also supports Intel Software Guard Extensions to allow SGX extensions to user applications.

Enhanced Performance and Resiliency

vSphere has always been terrific at running large, business-critical workloads – perhaps better than some cloud deployments, and with vSphere 7, we continue to innovate in this area. You can now host large workloads with an improved Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) that takes a workload-centric approach by using the VM DRS score for hosts as the metric to decide placements and keep VMs happy, instead of only focusing on cluster-level balancing. vSphere 7 also delivers enhanced application performance on supported hardware with vSphere Persistent Memory, providing applications access to ultra-fast storage at a lower cost. Moreover, it has updated vMotion to improve performance, and as a result, now supports live vMotion for your databases and mission-critical workloads. With vSphere 7, you can also benefit from cost-efficient AI/ML hardware pools of resources, using supported hardware such as NVIDIA GPUs. It also delivers a predictable quality of service for time-critical applications with the Precision Time Protocol (PTP).

The following breakthrough capabilities are available for customers using containers and Kubernetes. Note that the Kubernetes capabilities of vSphere 7 are available only as part of VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu.

Kubernetes/Containerized Workloads and VMs Running at Same Platform

You no longer need to have multiple separate systems for your virtual machines and containers. This release will have a transformative impact because we are removing a key barrier to the adoption of Kubernetes in enterprises: multiple, silo technology stacks. In the past, we have seen customers set up separate environments for Kubernetes with specialized teams and processes. By building Kubernetes into vSphere natively, customers can now consolidate their modern and traditional application environments into a single stack and immediately leverage existing technology and processes. This also addresses another key constraint of Kubernetes success: the skills gap. With minimal additional training, your vSphere administrators are now able to support Kubernetes and the modern applications run in containers.

Kubernetes Applications Streamlined Development

vSphere 7 enables the DevOps model with infrastructure access for developers through Kubernetes APIs. It includes the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service, which is VMware’s compliant and conformant Kubernetes implementation for building modern containerized applications. Besides, customers who are not looking for full Kubernetes compliance for their container instances can use the new vSphere Pod Service, which provides improved performance and security and is built into the hypervisor with VM-like isolation.

Kubernetes Applications Agility

Finally, a lot of values are introduced in vSphere with Kubernetes for the VI admin. It delivers a new way to manage infrastructure, called ‘application-focused management’ for containerized applications. This enables admins to apply policies to an entire group of objects and organize multiple objects into a logical group and then apply policies to the entire group. For example, an administrator can apply security policies and storage limits to a group of containers and Kubernetes clusters that represent an application, rather than to each of the objects individually. This helps improve productivity and reduce errors that can be costly to identify and correct.

vSphere with Kubernetes is available through VMware Cloud Foundation 4 with Tanzu. One key innovation available only in VMware Cloud Foundation is a set of developer-facing services and a Kubernetes API surface that IT can provision, called VMware Cloud Foundation Services.

VMware Cloud Foundation Services

Powered by innovations in vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, VMware Cloud Foundation Services is a new, integrated Kubernetes and REST API surface that enables you to control the infrastructure through API access to all core services.

It consists of two families of services: Tanzu Runtime Services and Hybrid Infrastructure Services.

Tanzu Runtime Services– deliver core Kubernetes development services, including an up-to-date distribution of:
- Tanzu Kubernetes GridService– which allows developers to manage consistent, compliant, and conformant Kubernetes clusters to build their modern applications.
Hybrid Infrastructure Services– include full Kubernetes and REST API access that spans creating and manipulating virtual machines, containers, storage, networking, and other core capabilities. It includes the following services today:
- vSphere Pod Service– extends Kubernetes with the ability to run pods directly on the hypervisor. When developers deploy containers using the vSphere Pod Service, they get the same level of security isolation, performance guarantees, and management capabilities that VMs enjoy, although it is not fully Kubernetes conformant.
- Storage service– allows developers to manage persistent disks for use with containers, Kubernetes, and virtual machines.
- Network service– allows developers to manage Virtual Routers, Load Balancers, and Firewall Rules.
- Registry service– allows developers to store, manage and better secure Docker and OCI images using Harbor.