As we all were waiting, VMware just introduced the re-architectured version of vSphere, with native Kubernetes support and ready for application modernization. vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, formerly known as Project Pacific brings variety of features and enhancements. “This is the biggest change since the launch of ESXi” said Pete Chargin, vSphere Product Marketing Director. For now, we’ll get into some of the enhancements.
Modern Applications
Speaking of modern applications, vSphere now supports Containers and Kubernetes, which paves the foundation for developers and DevOps teams to live easier, the Kubernetes supports comes with VMware Cloud Fondations. On the other hand Containers take advantage of vSphere features like HA, DRS, vDS and NSX portgroups.
Improved DRS
Another new enhancement is DRS which now cares more about VMs rather than hosts. in previous versions, DRS used to decide based on hosts’ resources to move workloads between cluster members, but it didn’t actually guarantee that, the result is desirable in terms of VMs performance degradation. vSphere 7 introduces the concept of VM DRS score to address this problem, in a way that VMs will be moved to the hosts providing a better score.
Assignable Hardware
When there are performance constraint issues, one of the solutions around is to leverage GPU accelerators to better VMs performance. Applications that can benefit from hardware accelerators, SAP HANA for instance used to lose features like HA and DRS because of Directpath IO limitations. with Assignable Hardware feature, we can benefit these features, but DRS has only initial placement here, no vMotion is supported.
Refactored vMotion
When there is a vMotion running on a resource-hungry VM, performance will be impacted. Page tracer which is looking for memory paging activities during vMotion has been improved to allow only one vCPU (all vCPUs in previous versions) to be busy enough to track these changes. The second process, memory copy, which used to transfer pages to the remote hosts in 4K block has been re-organized to use 1GB pages, which results in better optimization.
in the next blogpost, I will go through more enhancement.