VMware vSphere 8.0 Launch!

VMware vSphere 8.0 has arrived!  As in, “yes” you can download it now (https://via.vmw.com/download-vsphere-8).  VMware continues its long heritage of virtualization, bringing more operational benefits to the vSphere platform.  “Taking my security hat off”, you’d be surprised how many times we refresh hosts that have an uptime of well over 600 days!  VMware continues to improve the vSphere platform with a few notable features.  As always, WTGs [awesome] Professional Services team is here to help you!  Check out this site to help you understand your upgrade path and planning:  https://core.vmware.com/vsphere-8-upgrade-activity-path.

• vSAN 8 enhancements: Finally, we have real snapshots!  Check out the new ESA for vSAN.  It improves on vSAN technology with a new architecture and feature set (this is optional).  Read more here:  https://core.vmware.com/blog/scalable-high-performance-native-snapshots-vsan-express-storage-architecture#
• vDSE: vSphere Distributed Services Engine:  The most basic example of this is how VMware is able to offload network processing (vDS and NSX) to DPUs (think NVIDIA), freeing up general purpose CPU cycles to deliver a robust network experience AND provide resources back to VMs general vCPUs.  Very interesting to see how this develops – you could see how this modular approach could lead to other functions being offloaded from software/CPU into DPUs with this design.  An instance of vSphere is actually installed on the DPU (similar in a way to how the nested vSAN witness works).  The DPU instance of ESXi/vSphere is also updated with the “parent” vSphere host with vLCM DPU is also used for lifecycle management (vLCM is the replacement for VUM).  Check out Dell Technologies DPU brief:  https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/multicloud-on-your-terms-with-vxrail/
• [Enhanced] Native K8s (Tanzu): One of the struggles with containerization is the management aspect of it.  How do you reap the reward of simple containerization if you need to dump a bunch of time/effort into managing a Kubernetes environment?  VMware simplifies this by having native container/Kubernetes support, with significant enhancements in vSphere 8.0 of particular interest to the DevOps folks.  Read more here:  https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/vmware-tanzu-kubernetes-grid-2-0
• [More] Enhanced vMotion: Some might say vMotion “made” VMware.  It’s still true today, VMware or otherwise, some applications are impacted by live migration.  vSphere 7 made some dramatic strides in vMotion and vSphere 8.0 enhances vMotion significantly including adding application awareness to the “stun” process, a new migration transport mechanism that benefits cold migration (UDT:  https://core.vmware.com/resource/vsphere-vmotion-unified-data-transport) and a few others great technical features (https://core.vmware.com/blog/whats-new-vsphere-8-vmotion).  Related, there are some great new features in DRS too:  https://core.vmware.com/resource/whats-new-vsphere-8#sec21124-sub1