Everything is a bit too complicated when it comes to vSphere, and this feature is no exception. While configuring vSphere clusters, your VMs may need to be accessed by various hosts simultaneously or several VMs in a cluster need to write at once within the same host. Sounds quite routine, but there are several “hoops” to jump through to set that up properly.
Admittedly, the newly released VMware vSphere 7 Update 2 has brought along a lot of new interesting features. However, while the primary upgrades have been widely discussed, not all improvements have got their fair share of the spotlight, leaving some prominent new additions largely unnoticed.
VMware Customer Connect is definitely better than its predecessor, My VMware. The new Customer Connect portal is powered by a novel AI and machine learning for elevated user experience. It also allows you to manage user assets, licenses, teams and user rights, monitor infrastructure health, create support tickets and do a host of other things within a sleek new design.
People working with hybrid infrastructures must know how tiresome it can balance the on-premises and cloud resources. If only there were an option enabling you to manage it as a single environment! Luckily, the new VMware vSphere release, VMware Cloud on AWS, has something to say.
Virtualization machines (VMs) have various use cases, each defined by the IT resources at hand and respective end-goals. VMware vSphere and Horizon offer three types of cloning when it comes to VM interoperability: full, linked, and instant cloning. Each type has its benefits but also takes its own toll on the system.
More transparency, fewer hardware restrictions, freedom of choice, clarity of control, and immutability — that’s where backups are headed. Microsoft has been taking too long to adapt its ReFS to those consumer demands. Veeam and Linux, on the other hand, leverage those trends and offer immutability with reasonable freedom of object and cloud storage choice.
With new vSphere versions, it’s not just about one-click upgrades. There are various things an admin has to account for in good time. You need to consider the interoperability of other VMware products and other existing infrastructure components, which upgrade path to take, back-in-time upgrade threats, developing the upgrade plan, and necessary post-upgrade procedures.
VMware introduced quite a good chunk of innovations this time: performance has been improved dramatically, memory pre-copy technology completely re-architected. But the true novelty lies in new Enhanced vMotion Capabilities (EVC) for GPU, making it a real powerhouse for intense workloads (graphic software, ML/DL-workloads, etc.)
VMware presented vRealize AI Cloud during VMworld 2020 as its next step in cloud automation. The tool is designed for automated performance optimization as part of the Self-Driving Data Center concept. As defined by the vendor, it’s meant to monitor infrastructure performance and apply machine learning to improve performance as workloads change.
Cases like Meltdown and Spectre showed that minuscule flaws in hardware-layer security can become serious breaches in another person’s keen eyes. AMD’s SEV-ES and latest SEV-SNP exist to protect guest OS by encrypting all CPU register content. So, if your hypervisor is compromised, it won’t be able to access any guest OS data.
