vSphere 7 Update 3c

Vmware ESXi 7 Update 3 release from the market. This was to protect our customers from some potential failures as they upgrade to ESXi 7 Update 3 and our desire to minimize customer exposure to them. Also, Vmware resolved the issues and re-released ESXi 7 Update 3 to the market as part of vSphere 7 Update 3c.

For information on this release, please visit:

• vSphere ESXi 7 Update 3c Release Notes
• vCenter Server 7 Update 3c Release Notes
• vSphere 7 Update 3c – List of Known Issues and Workarounds

New features

• vSphere Memory Monitoring and Remediation, and support for snapshots of PMem VMs: vSphere Memory Monitoring and Remediation collects data and provides visibility of performance statistics to help you determine if your application workload is regressed due to Memory Mode. vSphere 7.0 Update 3 also adds support for snapshots of PMem VMs. For more information, see vSphere Memory Monitoring and Remediation.

• Extended support for disk drives types: Starting with vSphere 7.0 Update 3, vSphere Lifecycle Manager validates the following types of disk drives and storage device configurations:
  • HDD (SAS/SATA)
  • SSD (SAS/SATA)
  • SAS/SATA disk drives behind single-disk RAID-0 logical volumes
  For more information, see Cluster-Level Hardware Compatibility Checks.

• Use vSphere Lifecycle Manager images to manage a vSAN stretched cluster and its witness host: Starting with vSphere 7.0 Update 3, you can use vSphere Lifecycle Manager images to manage a vSAN stretched cluster and its witness host. For more information, see Using vSphere Lifecycle Manager Images to Remediate vSAN Stretched Clusters.

• vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) enhancements: With vSphere 7.0 Update 3, vSphere admins can configure vCLS virtual machines to run on specific datastores by configuring the vCLS VM datastore preference per cluster. Admins can also define compute policies to specify how the vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) should place vCLS agent virtual machines (vCLS VMs) and other groups of workload VMs.

• Improved interoperability between vCenter Server and ESXi versions: Starting with vSphere 7.0 Update 3, vCenter Server can manage ESXi hosts from the previous two major releases and any ESXi host from version 7.0 and 7.0 updates. For example, vCenter Server 7.0 Update 3 can manage ESXi hosts of versions 6.5, 6.7 and 7.0, all 7.0 update releases, including later than Update 3, and a mixture of hosts between major and update versions.

• New VMNIC tag for NVMe-over-RDMA storage traffic: ESXi 7.0 Update 3 adds a new VMNIC tag for NVMe-over-RDMA storage traffic. This VMkernel port setting enables NVMe-over-RDMA traffic to be routed over the tagged interface. You can also use the ESXCLI command esxcli network ip interface tag add -i <interface name> -t NVMeRDMA to enable the NVMeRDMA VMNIC tag.

• NVMe over TCP support: vSphere 7.0 Update 3 extends the NVMe-oF suite with the NVMe over TCP storage protocol to enable high performance and parallelism of NVMe devices over a wide deployment of TCP/IP networks.

• Zero downtime, zero data loss for mission critical VMs in case of Machine Check Exception (MCE) hardware failure: With vSphere 7.0 Update 3, mission critical VMs protected by VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance can achieve zero downtime, zero data loss in case of Machine Check Exception (MCE) hardware failure, because VMs fallback to the secondary VM, instead of failing. For more information, see How Fault Tolerance Works.
   
• Micro-second level time accuracy for workloads: ESXi 7.0 Update 3 adds the hardware timestamp Precision Time Protocol (PTP) to enable micro-second level time accuracy. For more information, see Use PTP for Time and Date Synchronization of a Host.
   
• Improved ESXi host timekeeping configuration:  ESXi 7.0 Update 3 enhances the workflow and user experience for setting an ESXi host timekeeping configuration. For more information, see Editing the Time Configuration Settings of a Host.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!