A new, more stable release of vSphere 7 Update 3 is now available that includes Log4j fixes for increased security. This comes after VMware rescinded ESXi 7 Update 3 back in November of 2021.
VMware has since announced this new update release that resolves these issues, and will be re-releasing ESXi 7 Update 3 as part of the vSphere 7 Update 3c – which also includes updates the vCenter Server.
What’s New
As with every update, there are hundreds of improvements, changes, and added features. This vSphere 7 Update 3 is the apex of update releases for vSphere 7, and includes several benefits worth mentioning off the bat:
- Kubernetes Integration: This is one of the biggest features on this update, and it’s called vSphere with Tanzu. It enables businesses to quickly run and operate container-based modern apps on top of their existing infrastructure. It also integrates with current environments, making configuration and deployment easy by adding flexible DHCP support.
- A new study found vSphere and vSphere with Tanzu can handle 6.3x more workloads than alternative systems. You can read more about it here.
- Decreased Use of SD Cards and USB Drives: SD cards and USB drives are basic devices that aren’t compatible with newer, modern operating systems. Such gadgets have lower perseverance and show a lack of quality and issues over time. Due to this, we are depreciating use of SD cards and USB drives as boot media, and will be doing work in the back end to assist in limiting the writes to the device.
- If you’d like to read more information about this, click
- vSphere Lifecycle Manager: While this is still in charge of all patching and deployment, a few note-worthy features have been added. This includes depot editing, extended hardware compatibility to include drive firmware, and vSAN witness management.
- VMware Cloud Technology On-Premises: By moving some technology from VMware Cloud into on-premises deployments, customers will experience reduced risk around patches and upgrades – this is similar to what VMware calls “Reduced Downtime Upgrades.” However, it wont only be for major updates, but for also regular patching.
- VMware vSphere + NVIDIA AI-Ready Enterprise Platform: VMware and NVIDIA worked together to create the NVIDIA AI Enterprise Suite. VMware brings its deep knowledge of infrastructure, operations, and management, while NVIDIA supplies GPU expertise, GPU virtualization technology, and prebuilt sets of tools data scientists can utilize when creating applications and are able to deploy them quickly.
- vSphere Memory Monitoring and Remediation (vMMR): Before the vSphere 7 Update 3, it wasn’t easy to access memory statistics unless you installed an additional third-party command line tool. But now, they’re built in directly to vSphere, and are also visible in the UI.
- Improvements to vCLS: vSphere Cluster Service is the home for DRS inside a vSphere cluster. After first introducing this feature in vSphere 7 Update 1, there was plenty of feedback that has been implemented in these changes. You’re now able to specifically choose which datastore you’d like, as well as control some of the affinity settings to your preference and/or workload.
- Improved Guest OS support: VMware’s efforts with cloud-init have now been merged into the main code base for the cloud-init project. This means that no additional tools need to be installed for Linux to work seamlessly with VMware.
- Core Storage Enhancements: VMware updated the VMFS-6 Affinity Manager which keeps track of available resources on disk, as well as supports handling first-class disks and container-native storage in the same way. There is also a more proficient process for taking large volumes of snapshots by batching them up. Lastly, with Update 3 you don’t need special approval to have up to 128 hosts connect to a single VMFS6 or NFS datastore
If you’d like to read more about each of these topics in detail, click here.