What is VMware? IT Virtualization for Businesses

The Foundations:

VMware vSphere is a suite that includes a collection of products and features, which together offer a full range of level virtualization capabilities Enterprise.

After 5 years, VMware presents its major release.

In fact, at the beginning of March 2020, the new version of the vSphere 7 Hypervisor was announced, which brings with it several innovations.

One of the biggest surprises released with this version is full container support Kubernetes.

A bit of history:

During the VMworld 2019 Has the project been announced Pacific, which aimed to evolve vSphere, transforming it into a native Kubernetes platform. With this new version it becomes reality. It will then be possible to run containers and virtual machines simultaneously in the same environment, managing both Virtual Machines and Containers from a single point.

The Functionalities:

VMware therefore presents a portfolio of products and services, that allows customers to modernize applications on Kubernetes. This is called VMware Tanzu.

VMware Tanzu, includes in his portfolio Tanzu Mission Control, which provides businesses with a single point of control to manage Kubernetes clusters, wherever they are.

All this thanks also to the new version of VMware Cloud Foundation, now at version 4. An infrastructure of hybrid cloud for modern applications.

VMware 7 with Kubernetes, in fact, will currently be available only on through VMware Cloud Foundation 4.

Let's then try to summarize the other great changes introduced by this version:

VMware Lifecycle Manager and Update Planner

The solution allows you to streamline exemplify software and hardware lifecycle management.

With Update Planner which manages updates and upgrades within the same interface, with queries on interoperability matrices, to verify which products within vSphere meet the minimum software and hardware requirements for a successful update of vCenter Server.

Here's a quick introductory video

Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)

What is it?

The DRS is that system that is concerned with monitoring the resources of a cluster and moves the virtual machines to another host if the occupancy of resources puts it at risk. The DRS logic is now being radically changed, for better meet the needs containers and virtual machines. So watching to the execution efficiency of each machine virtual instead of simply balancing the cluster.

This, assigning a score to the DRS cluster, which is calculated every minute with different metrics.

VMotion

VMotion has also been greatly improved. This is to overcome migration problems for all those Virtual Machines with high memory and CPU usage. The performance impact of VMotion has always prevented the user from using this functionality on this type of VM.

The memory is transferred to pages of 1GB (compared to the previous 4k), which together with other optimizations makes the more efficient transfer.

It therefore improves “stun time” by making the operation lighter, greatly reducing the disruption and the execution time of the VMotion.

Assignable Hardware

A new framework called Assignable Hardware, developed to support customers using hardware acceleration.

The hardware address of a PCI e device is no longer directly mapped to the configuration file of a virtual machine, but is now presented as a functionality of the PCI device and to the virtual machine.

What's going on?

When a VM is configured to use a PCI e device, you will be presented with three options:

· DirectPath I/O

· Dynamic DirectPath I/O

· NVIDIA vGPU

DirectPath I/O is the legacy functionality for passthrough a device without interacting with HA and DRS.

Dynamic DirectPath I/O, on the other hand, is the new solution that enables intelligent hardware assignment for device passthrough. The assignment is no longer to the physical address of the resource, but logical to any of the hosts that provide the requested resource.

To take advantage of this functionality, version 17 of VMHardware is required.

NVIDIA vGPU, is a versatile solution developed in collaboration with NVIDIA. For those interested, please refer to the more coveted post that explains how an NVIDIA GPU can be integrated into the vSphere platform: BY CLICKING HERE

Virtual Machine Hardware version 17

As already mentioned, it is the requirement to take advantage of Assignable Hardware, but it brings with it two other new features:

Precision Time Protocol (PTP): Developed for applications that require sub-millisecond accuracy.

Virtual Watchdog Timer: Without a watchdog timer, there's no standard way to know if the operating system or applications have crashed. This watchdog timer comes in handy if the guest OS is no longer responding. It is important for clustered applications, such as databases or file systems.

Safety

Also on the security front, several improvements have been introduced, such as authentication through an external Identity Federation (ADFS), and the new Trusted Computer Base functionality, to name a few.

Trusted Computer Base allows organizations to dedicate a set of very secure ESXi hosts and to use this set of hosts to ensure that other hosts are trusted and have not been modified in an unauthorized way. For example, it would not be possible to turn on a VM with encryption on a host that is considered to be insecure.

Other characteristics

With vSphere 7, you can no longer deploy external Platform Services Controllers or vCenter Server on Windows. If you install vCenter Server 7, the vCenter instance will be automatically migrated to Appliance with embedded PSC. Support for multiple network adapters for the vCenterServer appliance and new CLI tools have also been added.

For more curiosities, please share the video of the launch of vSphere 7

We also share the link to vSphere 7 blog which is constantly updated with new information:

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