VMware vSphere 6.7 Released

Two days ago, 2018-04-17, VMware released a new version of vSphere meaning the latest and greatest version is now 6.7.

The core of VMware vSphere is and has always been the management tool vCenter Server and the hypervisor ESXi (which was ESX initially).

The best enhancement in the VMware vCenter Server 6.7 release is that it will reduce the:

Components needed
Time to design a solution
Time to implement a solution
Time to operate the solution.

Sounds really good and it is made possible since VMware finally decided to go back to a single instance solution meaning no more multi component installations to achieve e.g. Enhanced Linked mode. The Platform Service Controller (PSC) can now live within a vCenter Server and does not need to be an external solution.

This means the single vCenter Server instance:

Does not need a load balancer for high availability and fully supports native vCenter Server High Availability.
does not have SSO Site boundary removal
Supports vSphere scale maximums.
Allows for 15 deployments in a vSphere Single Sign-On Domain.

The vSphere Client (HTML5) includes some nice enhancements and can now also manage the following in addition to its existing capabilities:

vSphere Update Manager
Content Library
NSX
vSAN
Storage Policies
Host Profiles
vDS Topology Diagram
Licensing

Some other enhancements and new features included are:

Monitoring in the vCenter Server vSphere Appliance Management Interface (VAMI) interface.
- The one reached via https://vcenter_FQDN:5480
Enhanced backup and restore capabilities in vCenter Server (VAMI).
encrypted vMotion across different vCenter instances
vCenter Server Hybrid Linked Mode
cmsso-util is back so you can repointing vCenter Server across SSO Sites within a vSphere SSO domain.
Multiple Syslog targets.
Host-Pinning and iSCSI failover support
Support for Microsoft Virtualization Based Security
vSphere Persistent Memory – Taking advantage of non-volatile memory
ESXi Single Reboot – No more multiple reboots required for major patcvhes/upgrades
ESXi vSphere Quick Boot – Skipping hardware initialization steps
Enhancements to Nvidia GRID™ vGPU
Intelligent Self-Healing Capabilities
Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 Support and Virtual TPM 2.0 – enhance protection and integrity for both the hypervisor and the guest operating system (OS)
Integrated vRealize Operations Healthchecks in vCenter Server
Enhanced vSAN Encryption so it now meets U.S. Federal government security requirements with FIPS 140-2.

Upgrade is available from vCenter Server 6.0 and 6.5 but not from any older versions.

vCenter Server 6.7 is the last version (yet to be seen in the future) that will support:

vCenter Server running on a Windows Server.
vCenter Server Flash Client.

Based on internal VMware tests there will also be resource efficiencies and performance improvements according to:

200 % faster performance in vCenter Server operations per second
300 % reduction in memory usage
300 % faster DRS-related operations (e.g. Power-on, Placement of VM)

In addition to vCenter Server and ESXi VMware also released a new version of vSphere Replication which includes e.g:

New HTML5 UI
The vSphere Replication virtual appliance uses Photon OS 2.0
Unified native hypervisor-based replication solution for on-premises environment and VMware Cloud on AWS
Support for vSphere 6.0 U3 to vSphere 6.7

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