VMware vSphere 8.0 Update 3 released
Broadcom VMware released the new VMware vSphere 8.0 Update 3 providing new interesting features and enhancements.
The new Update 3 is focusing to improve Lifecycle Management, Hardware compatibility, Security, and workload efficiency.
VMware vSphere 8.0 Update 3 highlights
Several enhancements and new features come with VMware vSphere 8.0 Update 3.
Lifecycle Management is the area where the majority of new features and enhancements took place as well as the NVIDIA GPU profiles management.
Lifecycle Management
The new vSphere 8.0 Updated 3 provides a significant enhancements in the Lifecycle Management area introducing new features:
- vSphere Lifecycle Manager - includes the new vSphere Live Patch, Enhanced Image Customization and support for dual DPU configurations.
- vCenter Reduced Downtime - vCenter Server can now be patched with minimal downtime.
vSphere Live Patch
Part of the vSphere Lifecycle Manager, in vSphere 8.0 Update 3 when a new patch must be installed to address a critical bug, vSphere Live Patch feature allows to patch the cluster without rebooting or evacuating the entire host.
During the remediation VMs are fast-suspend-resumed (FSR), a non disruptive operation already used when modifying virtual hardware devices to powered-on virtual machines.
FSR mode is not supported for VMs configured for vSphere Fault Tolerance, VM DirectPath I/O devices, vSphere Pods. Virtual machines not compatible with FSR must be manually migrated.
Partial Maintenance Mode
When a vSphere Live Patch remediation task is performed, the host is put in a Partial Maintenance Mode where VMs will continue to run but new VMs cannot be created and the migration from and to the host is disabled (picture from VMware).
Enhanced Image Customization
The customization of vSphere Lifecycle Manager images has been enhanced in vSphere 8.0 Updated 3.
VMware Host Client (ESXi UI) and VMware Tools components can be deleted from the image as well as removing some non-essential components (such as vendor drivers, drivers to retain) allowing to reduce the image size (picture from VMware).
Dual DPU Support
With vSphere 8.0 Update 3 dual DPU configurations are now supported ensure all versions are kept at the same version (picture from VMware).
vCenter Reduced Downtime Update
All vCenter deployment topologies are supported with vCenter Reduced Downtime Update feature.
When the vCenter Server is updated, the Automatic Switchover option is available to reduce the service downtime (2-5 minutes). It is still possible to use the Manual Switchover to control when the switchover phase takes place (picture from VMware).
vGPU Profiles
With Update 3 is no longer required to use same vGPU profile type and GPU memory size for NVIDIA vGPU workloads.
VM can now be configured with different vGPU profile types to the same physical GPU optimizing the GPU resources consumption. Memory sizes of the profiles can also differ (picture from VMware).
Embedded vSphere Cluster Service
With the new vSphere 8.0 Update 3, vSphere Cluster Service (vCLS) has been re-designed to use fewer resources, remove storage footprint running entirely in host memory.
The number of vCLS per cluster has been reduced to two VMs (picture from VMware).
Customizable Virtual Hardware Deployment
During the deployment of OVF/OVA templates from the Content Library, it is now possible to customize the virtual hardware (picture from VMware).
Snapshot retention-based removal
With Update 3 is now possible to configure a retention for snapshots allowing the users to specify the age of the snapshot to remove.
PingFederate support in vSphere Identity Federation
In addition to Entra ID, Okta, and ADFS support, vSphere Update 3 now supports PingFederate as an external Identity Provider (picture from VMware).
Additional information about VMware vSphere 8.0 Update 3 can be found in the Release Notes.
