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With vSphere 6.7 and vSAN 6.7 VMware Aims To Fine-Tune Its Hybrid Cloud Offerings

vSphere 6.7 and vSAN 6.7 include both new and enhanced features.

• By Wendy A. Hernandez
• 04/19/2018

New versions of VMware vSphere and vSAN were introduced by a number of VMware blogs this week, as well as by the company's official press release.

As Tom Fenton explains in his "Here's What's New in vSphere 6.7" article, "with this release it's clear VMware is not content to let its hypervisor become a commodity, and that it's possible to make incremental, evolutionary changes to a proven product and, moreover, that VMware is still making substantial investments in its hypervisor."

Here's a list of both the improved and new features you'll find in vSphere 6.7 (be sure to see Fenton's article for a drill down on what he thinks are the most important ones), according to the release:

• New vCenter Hybrid Linked Mode: Will enable unified visibility and management across different versions of vSphere running on-premises and in the public cloud such as VMware Cloud on AWS, IBM Cloud and other VMware Cloud Provider Program partner clouds. This will allow customers to maintain their current version of vSphere on-premises as needed while enjoying the benefits of new capabilities in vSphere-based public clouds.
• New ESXi Single Reboot and vSphere Quick Boot: Will significantly reduce patch and upgrade times by halving the number of reboots required to one, while vSphere Quick Boot will skip hardware initialization steps to gain further re-start efficiencies.
• New vSphere Persistent Memory: Will leverage the latest innovation around non-volatile memory and significantly enhance performance for both existing and new apps.
• Enhanced NVIDIA GRID vGPUs Support for Modern Workloads: Will improve host lifecycle management and reduce end-user disruption via new suspend and resume capabilities for VMs for GPU-accelerated environments. vSphere 6.7 will enhance support for NVIDIA GRID Virtual PC/Virtual Apps (for knowledge workers) and NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation (for design and engineering professionals) to enable optimal management of VDI workloads as well as enable administrators (admins) to run other NVIDIA GPU-enabled workloads, including AI and ML.
• New Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 Support and Virtual TPM 2.0: This combination will significantly enhance protection and integrity for both the hypervisor and the guest operating system (OS). Virtual TPM 2.0 will help prevent VMs and hosts from being tampered or compromised, thwarting the loading of unauthorized components and enable guest OS security features.
• Enhanced VMware vSphere Client: This latest release of the HTML-5-based vSphere Client will introduce new functionality to manage VMware NSX, vSAN and vSphere Update Manager along with an increased support for third-party products.     

Of course, vSAN also has a slew of new and improved features, which include (according to the release):

• New VMware vSphere HTML5 Client Support: Will provide vSAN admins with a unified, intuitive management experience using the HTML5-based vSphere Client that introduces new functionality and optimized workflows for vSAN operations.
• New Integrated vRealize Operations Healthchecks in vCenter Server: Will offer a single pane of glass to monitor and control multiple HCI environments. vRealize Operations 6.7 will provide a global operations view of vSAN 6.7 environments with six new dashboards embedded within vCenter Server 6.7 enabling customers to monitor capacity, performance, KPIs and alerts, and more. This capability does not require a separate vRealize Operations license and is available to anyone with a vSAN Advanced or vSAN Enterprise license.
• New Host-Pinning and iSCSI failover support: Will extend the suitability of HCI to applications such as Cassandra, Hadoop and MongoDB as well as to clustered Windows Server environments. New application support requires customers to contact VMware for additional details.
• New Intelligent Self-Healing Capabilities: Will mitigate the effects of disruptive events such as hardware failures with smart resource allocation.
• Enhanced vSAN Encryption: Will meet strict U.S. Federal government security requirements with FIPS 140-2 validation to protect data from disruptive events.

Both products are expected to be available in the first fiscal quarter of 2019, which is May 4, 2018.