VMware is at it again with a couple big updates for the vSphere suite of products.   I was  fortunate enough to be invited to several pre-VMworld vExpert-only webinars last week where we learned all about the new stuff coming our way later this quarter.

First up we have vSphere 6.7 Update 1, which is introducing a few big features as well as some very welcome changes and updates.  I’ll dig more into this in a little bit.  The second big announcement is vSphere Platinum!  I’m not sure how that fits into the Standard and Enterprise Plus edition naming scheme but it’s PLATINUM so who cares!  Let’s dive in to the fun stuff.

vSphere 6.7 Update 1

vSphere 6.7 has been phenomenal so far.  I’ve had really good experiences moving customers to it and shedding the old vSphere C# Client as well as the Windows vCenters and SQL servers necessary to run them.  It’s really been a game changer to drop in or upgrade to the VCSA and consolidate to one appliance to rule them all.  It’s also been a bit of a challenge due to hardware support mostly and backup vendor support.  The hardware support is a problem but is also helping drive a bit of hardware refresh as well so it’s not all bad from a reseller perspective.  The backup vendors have finally gotten their respective patches out and we’re able to get backups now for most if not all backup products.

So let’s learn about all the new things that are going to capitalize on the success of vSphere 6.7!  I’ll show you a few of the slides from the deck I was given without all the marketing fluff.  I’ve rearranged the order they were in as well so it makes more sense without the marketing/justification slides.

This first slide shows us just a few of the enhancements coming with vSphere 6.7 Update 1. The below are just a few of the enhancements coming to the new update.  I’ll unpack these a bit more further into the article.

I know I’ve definitely been keeping people the hell away from vSphere 6.5 Update 2 for many reasons but the biggest was no upgrade/migration path.  As you can see below VMware has been working on this and there is now a path forward.  Also good news that you can upgrade from any version of 6.0 or 6.5 to vSphere 6.7 Update 1 directly.In other huge news the vSphere Client (aka the HTML5 client) is feature complete.  I’ve grown quite fond of the HTML5 client and try to use it exclusively when possible.  It’s almost as good as the old C# client.  I’ve got loads of customers and peers that I’m sure will be happy to stop using the vSphere Web Client (Flash client).They’ve added the ability to control firewall rules from the vSphere Appliance Management Interface (VAMI) in this release.  They’ve also added the ability to login to the appliance with an SSO user which now you can see who logs into the appliance through logging.  This will definitely help you build an audit trail now.If you’ve done any vSphere 6.7 upgrade and you happened to be on an external PSC and separate vCenter server you may have run into a little issue.  If you were like me you may have expected to be able to take advantage of the vSphere 6.7 capability to run the PSC and vCenter on the same appliance and still be able to leverage Enhanced Linked Mode.  I’m sure also like me you quickly learned that this wasn’t possible.  Well guess what, with the Converge Tool now it is.

The Converge Tool will basically deploy the PSC RPMs onto the vCenter appliance and then allow you to decommission the external PSC.  How cool is that?  This one is going to get used a lot and is an incredibly welcome addition.

Next up VMware has added what they’re calling Cluster Quickstart.  Before you get to excited this is for hyperconverged environments using vSAN only.  If you do have vSAN though and are standing up a new cluster this is just incredible.  In roughly 3 steps you pick servers, add hosts, configure network settings and Cluster Quickstart will configure everything for you.  I’m excited to see this in action.Content Library is also getting some love here in that it now natively supports OVA and VMTX templates.  I think the template support sounds like it’s still a little rigid though so I’ll wait until I can see how this actually works before I form a judgement.  The question I had though is what happens if I want to update that VMTX based template?  I guess we’ll have to wait until release to find out.This next one is pretty interesting.  Embedded Repointing allows you to repoint the embedded PSC’s from different SSO domains to combine them into one SSO domain.  This also allows the reverse of that and you can split two or more appliances into separate SSO domains.  This is only for the embedded PSC deployment model at this time. vCenter High Availability is getting an improved workflow in the vSphere Client and a much simpler interface.It will also automatically deploy the clones for vCenter HA and has some additional built in monitoring and reporting for vCenter HA functionality. If you’ve got NVIDIA GRID vGPU desktops then this one is for you.  vMotion is HERE!?!?  Finally you can live migrate vGPU enhanced desktops without having to shut them down completely or, as with vSphere 6.7, Suspend and Resume them.  No more of that nonsense.  Now we can move them just like any other VM!  Hurray!!!Along with full vMotion compatibility for vGPU based VM’s they’ve added snapshot and hot-add support as well.Lastly, there is now vSAN integration into Update Manager.  This includes a firmware baseline for controllers.
That’s all I got on the vSphere 6.7 Update 1 changes.  Let’s take a look at vSphere Platinum!

vSphere Platinum

VMware has consolidated vSphere from Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions down to just Standard and Enterprise Plus as most of you know by now.  Well now they’re back to three editions again with the introduction of vSphere Platinum.  Simply put, it’s Enterprise Plus with AppDefense.  I’ll be completely transparent here.  I hadn’t even seen AppDefense until this presentation, though I’d heard a lot about it.  After seeing this, I must learn more about it.  It looks very interesting.  I’m going to check out the AppDefense Hands-On-Lab when I get back from VMworld this week.

AppDefense uses machine learning to analyze and recognize application behaviors across your infrastructure.  In doing so it can see when there is abnormal behavior in your environment and help you mitigate malware and other threat vectors.  From what I understand so far that’s just the tip of the iceberg of it’s considerable capabilities.  I’m going to follow this up once I’m able to get through the HOL.  Since I don’t know a whole lot about how this works enough to competently talk about it in detail I’m going to let the slides do most of the talking.  On to the slides!

The AppDefense plugin for vCenter only comes with Platinum edition.It maps process traffic across applications and servers monitoring application and process behaviors for anomalies.
A huge amount of granularity and control over the application layer.Per process port control over network connectivity.vSphere Client integration with AppDefense. More of the vSphere Client plugin. vSphere Client display of all process connectivity per VM.

Conclusion

So my goal is to learn more about AppDefense.  I’ll get something running in my lab after VMworld and come back and talk about vSphere Platinum and AppDefense in some more detail once I get more familiar with it.  Aside from that we learned that vSphere 6.7 Update 1 is going to be pretty awesome.  Both vSphere 6.7 Update 1 and vSphere Platinum are going to be available in the later part of the third quarter according to my sources.  There’s a few more announcements I may get to later this week if I can related to VMware Cloud on AWS, vROPs 7 and several other things.  Thanks for reading!