Vmware vSphere 8 update 1

 

Vmware vSphere 8 Update 1 release. Customers gain from improved operational effectiveness for administrators, accelerated performance for more demanding AI/ML workloads, and increased security throughout the environment with this release. According to our new release approach, vSphere 8 Update 1 has officially reached initial availability. General availability will follow.

Enhance Operating efficiency

In vSphere 8, vSphere Configuration Profiles were introduced as a tech preview with some limitations of not supporting vSphere Distributed Switch and NSX. If you have not checked this functionality, read my blog post on what’s new in vSphere 8, which explains this functionality in more detail. But In vSphere 8U1, vSphere Configuration Profile is now fully supported and allows administrators to apply the homogenous configuration at the cluster level.

So you can set the desired configuration at the cluster level in JSON format and check the compliance of the hosts in the cluster; if they are not compliant, you can remediate the hosts to become compliant. But one point to remember, If the cluster has a Host profile attached to it, you will get a warning to remove the Host profile when you want to move to vSphere Configuration Profile. When you transition, you can no longer attach host profiles to the hosts within the cluster. vSphere Configuration Profiles now supports vDS configuration, and it can be activated when you create a new cluster, but environments with NSX still can’t use this technology.

Supercharge Workload Performance

Enhancing the performance of AI/ML workloads is becoming more difficult for organisations. The size of AI/ML workloads is continuously growing, and more GPUs are being used. GPU demand is increasing at an accelerated rate.

Support for NVIDIA NVSwitch: With Update 1, vSphere 8 dramatically speeds up AI/ML application performance with support for NVIDIA NVSwitch (up to 900GB/s bidirectional speed with NVLink on Hopper), which connects up to 8 GPUs per host and up to 8 GPUs to the same VM.

Security

Today's organisations face higher security concerns. Security upkeep can be time-consuming. The security of mission-critical workloads is already boosted by vSphere's built-in security features, and Update 1 adds the following capabilities

• Okta Federated Identity Management for vCenter​: Update 1 expands vCenter support for 3rd party identity providers to Okta, in addition to Active Directory, OpenLDAP, and Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). Admins using Okta can log in once for both vCenter and NSX Manager.​ Multi-factor authentication with Okta can also be enabled. This capability improves both efficiency and security for customers’ environment.
• Support for Fault Tolerance of VMs Employing vTPM: Fault Tolerance provides continuous availability for a VM by maintaining an identical VM that can quickly failover in the event of a failure. Fault Tolerance for a VM employing a vTPM module is now supported. This capability helps admins achieve continuous availability and security for mission-critical VMs.

 

                          

• ESXi Quick Boot Support on Servers with TPM 2.0 Chips: Quick Boot is used in lifecycle management activities like patching, upgrades, etc., and saves considerable time. With update 1, TPM 2.0 does not need to be disabled for Quick Boot. Hence, this enhancement saves both life cycle management time for the admins and eliminates security gaps​.

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