VMware introduces version 6.7 of vSphere and vSAN
VMware premiered version 6.7 of both vSphere and vSAN with a focus on new hybrid cloud management capabilities.
VMware vSphere and vSAN are the company’s flagship virtualization products. The former serves as the company’s hypervisor and virtualization management platform, while the latter serves as its virtual storage technology. Both products have been updated with an eye toward hybrid cloud models, which consist of a mix of on-premises, private cloud and public cloud services.
Among the recent updates to vSphere 6.7 include a new feature called vCenter Hybrid Link Mode. This is intended to enable unified visibility and management across different versions of vSphere running on-premises and in the public cloud, including VMware Cloud on AWS, IBM Cloud and other VMware Cloud Provider Program partner clouds. The company said this will allow customers to maintain their current version of vSphere on-premises, while embracing new capabilities in vSphere-based public clouds.
Moreover, vSphere 6.7 includes a new ESXi single reboot and vSphere Quick Boot to reduce patch and upgrade times. Additionally, the company added support for persistent memory with vSphere 6.7 to help improve performance for both existing and new apps. Moreover, VMware added new capabilities for running virtual machines powered by GPUs, which ought to improve host lifecycle management and minimize end-user disruption.
With respect to vSAN 6.7, the latest version is intended to address the increased adoption of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI). According to the company, vSAN 6.7 will extend the suitability of HCI to applications, such as Cassandra, Hadoop and MongoDB as well as to clustered Windows Server environments. It also includes six new dashboards embedded within vCenter Server 6.7, HTML5 client support, host-pinning and iSCSI failover support, intelligent self-healing capabilities and enhanced data encryption. Both vSphere and vSAN 6.7 are expected to be released in early May.
In other VMware related news, Aqua Security announced during the RSA Conference 2018 a collaboration with VMware, which will enable customers to protect applications deployed across both virtual machines and containers. According to the company, the combination of Aqua’s Container Security Platform with VMware AppDefense will provide enterprise security teams with a security solution that provides a single-pane-of-glass to secure applications, which includes both containerized and non-containerized components.
