What's New in vSphere 8?

As organizations embrace cloud, they are beginning to turn a new chapter in the era of multi-cloud. Multi-cloud has quickly become the dominant deployment model. According to a 451 Research study, 75% of all enterprises have multi-cloud footprints. Many enterprises choose to run mission critical workloads on-premises to take advantage of data locality, predictable workload performance and low network latency. As larger masses of data accumulate in the enterprise, they tend to attract more local services and applications to minimize latency, increase throughput, and maximize workload performance.

VMware vSphere 8 is the enterprise workload platform that brings the benefits of cloud to on-premises workloads. It supercharges performance with DPU and GPU based acceleration, enhances operational efficiency through the VMware Cloud Console, seamlessly integrates with add-on hybrid cloud services, and accelerates innovation with an enterprise-ready integrated Kubernetes runtime that runs containers alongside VMs.

Let’s get into more detail.

GET CLOUD BENEFITS ON-PREMISES

Enhance existing on-premises workloads in place with cloud services.

In June of last year, VMware launched VMware vSphere+, a new offering from the vSphere family, which combines industry-leading cloud infrastructure technology, an enterprise-ready Kubernetes environment, and high-value cloud services to transform existing on-premises deployments into SaaS-enabled infrastructure . vSphere 8 takes these benefits several steps further.

With vSphere 8, IT admins can deploy the following add-on cloud services that protect workloads and optimize infrastructure, with more on the way.

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery add-on service drives resilience of mission critical workloads by protecting them from disasters and ransomware.

VMware vRealize Operations add-on service provides capacity planning and optimization for your infrastructure with the right size to fit the current and future needs of your workloads.

SUPERCHARGE WORKLOAD PERFORMANCE

Meet the throughput and latency needs of modern distributed workloads

vSphere 8 ushers in a new era of heterogeneous computing by introducing Data Processing Units to Enterprises through VMware vSphere Distributed Services Engine. vSphere Distributed Services Engine is the next step in the evolution of cloud infrastructure for modern applications, in which the stewardship for running infrastructure services is distributed between the CPU and the DPU.

vSphere Distributed Services Engine modernizes cloud infrastructure into a distributed architecture enabled by DPUs to:

• Meet the throughput and latency needs of modern distributed workloads by accelerating networking functions
• Deliver best infrastructure price-performance by providing more CPU resources to workloads
• Reduce operational overhead of DPU lifecycle management with integrated vSphere workflows

vSphere Distributed Services Engine preserves the existing Day-0, Day-1 and Day-2 vSphere experience, with which customers are familiar. It is supported on a broad choice of DPUs from leading silicon vendors (NVIDIA & AMD) and server designs from OEMs (Dell, HPE).

Distributed Services Engine offloads and accelerates vSphere Distributed Switch and NSX Networking on the DPU, with additional services to follow in the future. So right away, this will benefit customers running applications that demand high network bandwidth and fast cache access such as in-memory databases.

VMware’s internal benchmarking study running Redis on a DPU-enabled host achieved 36% better throughput along with a 27% reduction in transaction latency. In another scenario, a DPU-enabled host achieved performance similar to a non-DPU system, with 20% fewer CPU cores. These powerful results show how vSphere 8 enables customers to lower total cost of computing and improve workload performance.

ENHANCE OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY

Efficiently reduce IT maintenance windows.

IT admins spend a lot of time upgrading and maintaining infrastructure. Though regular maintenance operations help ensure uptime and availability, they take time away from running business critical applications. vSphere 8 optimizes maintenance windows by pre-staging ESXi image downloads and performing simultaneous upgrades on hosts, allowing teams to return faster to regular operations.

With the growth of workloads on-premises and at the edge, initial placement and migration are critical aspects that help infrastructure teams maximize service availability, balance utilization, and minimize downtime. vSphere 8 gives a major upgrade to vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler and vMotion. Distributed Resources Scheduler now factors workload memory usage into placement decisions. It can now place workloads more optimally by taking into consideration memory needs of workloads.

vMotion now supports migration of VMs running on hosts that support Intel Scalable I/O Virtualization (Intel SIOV). Workloads can now simultaneously enjoy the benefits of SIOV passthrough performance and mobility across the vSphere infrastructure.

According to an IDC study, 65% of the global GDP will be digitalized by 2022(4). The IDC study points out the Global Data Sphere is expected to double between 2022 and 2026(5). As the footprint of computing continues to grow, many enterprises are starting to think about sustainable ways to operate infrastructure. VMware has taken the first step in helping enterprises develop sustainable computing strategies. vSphere 8 introduces Green Metrics – that help you track power consumed by workloads and infrastructure operations. This is just the first step in helping customers realize the potential and opportunities to reduce their carbon footprint while meeting business objectives.

ACCELERATE INNOVATION FOR DEVOPS

Easily discover, access and deploy developer services.

While Kubernetes has gained widespread adoption as the de-facto container orchestration technology, IT organizations need a simple and easy way to manage containers alongside VMs. That is why VMware created a streamlined Kubernetes management experience that is natively built into vSphere. With vSphere 8, VMware is delivering VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0 – designed to help IT teams and developers address the growing complexity of agile development environments. This latest release of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid adds new flexibility and control for cluster creation, open-source API alignment, and improved application lifecycle management capabilities.

DevOps teams spend a significant amount of time setting up Kubernetes clusters. Even in cases where infrastructure services are readily accessible, they are designed to meet the needs of IT admins and not necessarily integrated with the development environment. As a result, developers either rely on IT admins to provision developer services or stand-up infrastructure silos to address their needs. With vSphere 8, DevOps teams can now access IaaS services (like provisioning VMs, networking, setting up Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters) easily from the new Cloud Consumption Interface service. The Cloud Consumption Interface simplifies infrastructure setup across the vSphere estate through intuitive UIs and developer friendly APIs, freeing up time that can be spent on real development efforts.

LEARN MORE

Find out how Skillsoft Global Knowledge can help you and your team get ready for VMware vSphere 8 and supercharge workload performance, accelerate innovation for DevOps, and enhance operational efficiency – all while bringing the benefits of the cloud to on-premises workloads.

Browse our vSphere 8 courses:

• VMware vSphere: What’s New (v8) – available soon
• VMware vSphere: Fast Track (v8) 
• VMware vSphere: Install, Configure and Manage (v8)
• VMware vSphere: Troubleshooting (v8) – available soon
• VMware vSphere: Operate, Scale and Secure (v8) 

Source: VMware blog - https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2022/08/introducing-vsphere-8-the-enterprise-workload-platform.html