vSphere 7 Update 2 Release

VMware has released vSphere 7 Update 2. It is available to download right away, both through VMware Customer Connect and from within vSphere Lifecycle Manager itself.

What’s New in vSphere 7 Update 2

With the release of vSphere 7, we set the direction for the key focus areas where we are making investments in vSphere, incorporating feedback about what is most important for you and that will get you to your organizations’ goals now and in the future, leveraging the latest technology has to offer. We continue to double-down on these focus areas, to deliver to you the modern infrastructure platform for all your existing workloads and the new modern applications you are building, leveraging containers as well as artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML).

These key areas are:

 

 

Deliver AI & Developer Ready Infrastructure

First off, we’re thrilled to share that VMware and NVIDIA are delivering the next step of the vision shared in the partnership announced at VMworld 2020 to democratize and unleash AI for every enterprise. With the unique combination of VMware vSphere 7 and NVIDIA AI Enterprise suite, both companies are jointly delivering a powerful AI-Ready Enterprise Platform.

NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite is an end-to-end cloud-native suite of AI tools and frameworks, optimized and exclusively certified by NVIDIA to run on VMware vSphere.

 

 

 

VMware vSphere 7 Update 2 delivers:

•  Support for the latest generation of GPUs from NVIDIA, their Ampere family, with the A100 GPU delivering up to 20X better performance from the previous generation.Support for NVIDIA MIGs
•  Support for NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA for vGPUs, for enhanced performance.
•  Support for the latest spatial partitioning based NVIDIA multi-instance GPUs (MIGs):
•  vSphere is the ONLY virtualization platform that enables live migration (using vMotion) for NVIDIA MIG vGPU powered VMs, simplifying infrastructure maintenance such as consolidation, expansion, or upgrades, and enabling non-disruptive operations
• With the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), vSphere provides automatic initial workload placement for AI infrastructure at scale for optimal resource consumption and avoiding performance bottlenecks.
• Bitfusion 3.0, continuing to make GPU use flexible and operationally efficient

 Boost Infrastructure and Data Security

With security being a huge area of focus for organizations of all types and sizes worldwide, vSphere 7 Update 2 delivers some key new capabilities:

•     Introducing vSphere Native Key Provider, a mechanism fully within vSphere to enable data-at-rest protections like vSAN Encryption, VM Encryption, and vTPM out of the box, making it a lot easier for customers to take advantage of these security features and improve overall security posture for VM environments.
•     Confidential Containers for vSphere Pods, leveraging the AMD SEV-ES memory and CPU data encryption on AMD EPYC platforms for modern and easy-to-use data-in-use protections.
•     ESXi Configuration Encryption, using software and hardware Trusted Platform Module (TPM) support to protect ESXi secrets on the hosts themselves and making hardware lifecycle, reprovisioning, and decommissioning easier.
•     ESXi Key Persistence, offering more options for data-at-rest protections on standalone hosts, edge computing deployments, and removing dependency loops from system designs.
•     Updated baseline security guidance in the vSphere Security Configuration Guide for customers designing new systems or looking for ways to improve their existing security in the face of changing threats.
•     Updated vSphere Product Audit Guides, together with FIPS validation of vCenter Server services. Together these make it easier for customers to meet regulatory requirements, as well as helping to ease audits by supplying an explanation of how vSphere security controls meet particular compliance controls.

The latest vSphere 7 Update 2 release further highlights vSphere as the industry’s leading compute virtualization platform that transforms bare metal server, CPU, and GPU-based hardware into virtual machines and containers. vSphere optimizes performance, increases availability, tightens security, and streamlines maintenance to create an agile, efficient, resilient, and intrinsically secure infrastructure platform to support existing workloads and next-gen applications such as AI.

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