VMware vSphere 6.7 U3 Announced – What’s New?

VMware quietly announced VMware vSphere 6.7 U3. As usually, the bits are not available for download yet. When they will, I'll let you know. The announcement has been done through VMware blog post here.

We can see, that the product has integrated some new features which again, will make VMware administration more easy and more flawless. One of those features which have been added is, for example, a vCenter Server PNID change (PNID stands for Primary Network IDentifier of vCenter Server), and it is the “system name” set in the installer when deploying vCenter Server.

Update: The vSphere 6.7 U3 has been Released!

There was no way to change it after the vCenter server was installed. Now it will be possible.

VMware is also introducing compatibility with the 2nd Generation of AMD EPYC™ processors. This is good for users willing to go the AMD way when it comes to CPU as the EPYC CPUs got better performance.

There are other new features, such as VMXNET v4 introduced, which we'll discuss in this post.

VMware vSphere 6.7 U3 Announced – What's New?

• AMD Epyc CPU support – 6.7 U3 release will be compatible with the 2nd Generation of AMD EPYC™ processors. AMD and VMware recently announced a close collaboration to deliver support for new security and other features of the high-performance 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors
• vCenter Server PNID change – Primary Network IDentifier of vCenter Server (PNID), system name of vCenter server, which is set in the installer when deploying vCenter Server. Now it will be possible to change the PNID after installation. It will help customers to support different migration scenarios. Changing the FQDN of the vCenter Server can also be helpful to support mergers & acquisitions where server naming conventions may differ between firms.

Quote:

Changing the vCenter Server’s FQDN or PNID has not been supported in previous versions of vSphere until now in version 6.7 Update 3. This new feature allows customers the flexibility to rename the vCenter Server’s FQDN in a supported manner.

• Dynamic DNS support – VCSA will have the ability to register itself dynamically on DNS servers. Previously a static DNS creation was required by the admin before the installation.
• Driver Enhancements – There are new enhancements to VMXNET3. It will be possible to use “a guest encapsulation offload and UDP, and ESP RSS support to the Enhanced Networking Stack (ENS). Checksum calculations are offloaded from encapsulated packets to the virtual device emulation and you can run RSS on UDP and ESP packets on demand. The feature requires a corresponding VMXNET3 v4 driver.
• VSAN 6.7 U3 with performance enhancements – vSphere 6.7 Update 3 will provide significant performance enhancements to VMware vSAN. VMware has a post about the details of VSAN 6.7 in this post here.
• Support for multiple NVIDIA® vGPUs – multiple NVIDIA GRID virtual GPUs (vGPU) per VM to enable more graphics and compute-intensive workloads running on vSphere. (Up to 4 NVIDIA vGPUs connected to one virtual machine.

Some details and requirements about the FQDN changes for vCenter server (from VMware):

• Changing this FQDN is only supported for embedded vCenter Server nodes
• Verify plug-in compatibility prior to changing a vCenter Server FQDN. An FQDN change is not recommended if NSX, vRA, SRM plug-ins are registered with vCenter Server.
• Replication agreements between the VCSA node changing its FQDN should be removed via vdcrepadmin (do not remove all replication agreements within the topology)
• vCenter HA (VCHA) should be destroyed prior to an FQDN change and reconfigured after changes
• All custom certificates will need to be regenerated
• Hybrid Linked Mode with Cloud vCenter Server must be recreated
• vCenter Server that has been renamed will need to be rejoined back to Active Directory
• Make sure that the new FQDN/Hostname is resolvable to the provided IP address (DNS A records)

Final words

VMware continues to improve its flagship product – vSphere. It's been several releases since there are no updates for Flash client (phased out). Other products updates, such as vSphere Replication, has also been updated recently.

Links: VMware blog

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