What’s New vSphere 6.7 – Why upgrade?

To be honest; there are so many new enhancements and features in the vSphere 6.7 I have had to limit myself, and here are my 9 new top rave (must know about) features (and they’re not in any specific order):

1. The vSphere Client (HTML-5 or h5) is about 95% feature complete:

We are now at the usability and acceptability point for this new web client.  I believe that the majority of you will be very happy with what you will see and with the overall experience of using the h5 client. Personally, the h5 client just feels faster and seems much more intuitive. VMware have said that the h5 Client will be fully complete shortly.

2. Improved vCenter Appliance Management and Monitoring:

When it comes to the management and monitoring of the vCenter Appliance there are a whole load of useful improvements. You can immediately see when a there is a potential issue such as a particular disk running out of space, and you can restart any service quickly and easily from the “Services” tab. By the way – VMware has said that ver 6.7 will be THE LAST version to offer support for vCenter running on a Windows Operating System, so if you’re still running vCenter on Windows – you have plenty of time to plan your migration to the vCenter Appliance.

3. Improved vCenter Backup Management:

VMware introduced the Backup and Recovery of the vCenter appliance some time back and while it was really useful it didn’t provide a scheduling mechanism (ie: It was a manual procedure). Now in the Appliance Management UI you can simply create a schedule for backups. 

4. ESXi Quick Boot:

This is a new and improved way to restart the hypervisor without going through the physical hardware reboot process. This means that you are now missing out that last reboot (of course I am assuming that your server hardware supports this feature!) Note that with the first release of vSphere 6.7 only a limited set of servers will support this new feature, nevertheless this is a big thing. Not just for reboots, but also for upgrades and/or updates. A second ESXi memory image can be created and updated, and when "rebooting" you simply switch over to the new image instead of doing a full (hard/cold) physical reboot.

5. 4K Native Drive Support:

This will be very useful for those who want to use the large capacity devices, and that 4K Drives will also be supported for use in your vSAN

6. vSphere Persistent Memory:

With vSphere Persistent Memory, customers using supported hardware modules, such as those available from Dell-EMC and HPE, can leverage them either as super-fast storage with high IOPS, or expose them to the guest operating system as non-volatile memory. It is something that introduces new possibilities as this will provide you with performance that’ll be much higher than current SSD but at a cost which is lower than DRAM. (Think less than 1 microsecond of latency, where nanoseconds is for DRAM, and Flash typically performs at low milliseconds under load). NVDIMM will be big (this is the name more commonly used for Persistent Memory). For those of you planning on buying persistent memory, do note that your operating system also needs to understand how to use it. There is a Virtual NVDIMM device in vSphere 6.7 and if the Guest OS has support for it then it will be able to use this byte addressable device.

7. DRS initial placement improvements:

There already has been significant improvement in the initial placement process for DRS in version 6.5, but it only worked when HA was disabled. As of 6.7 it is also available when HA is enabled, making it much more likely that you will see up to three times decrease in the time that it takes for the initial placement process to complete

8. Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 hardware Support (and Virtual TPM):

vSphere 6.7 adds support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 hardware devices and introduces Virtual TPM 2.0, significantly enhancing protection and assuring integrity for both the hypervisor and the guest operating system. This capability helps prevent VMs and hosts from being tampered with, prevents the loading of unauthorized components and enables guest operating system security.

9. Per VM EVC Mode:

As virtual machines migrate between different data centres or from an on-premises data centre to the cloud and back, they will most likely move across different CPU types. vSphere 6.7 delivers a new capability that is key for the hybrid cloud, called Per-VM EVC. Per-VM EVC enables the EVC (Enhanced vMotion Compatibility) mode to become an attribute of the VM rather than the specific processor generation it happens to be booted on in the cluster. This allows for seamless migration across different CPUs by persisting the EVC mode per-VM during migrations across clusters and during power cycles.