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• ESXi 7.0 Update 2 supports vSphere Quick Boot on the following servers:
  • Dell Inc. PowerEdge M830, PowerEdge R830. HPE ProLiant XL675d Gen10 Plus. Lenovo   ThinkSystem SR 635,  ThinkSystem SR 655
• Some ESXi configuration files become read-only: As of ESXi 7.0 Update 2, configuration formerly stored in the files  /etc/keymap, /etc/vmware/welcome, /etc/sfcb/sfcb.cfg,  /etc/vmware/snmp.xml,  /etc/vmware/logfilters, /etc/vmsyslog.conf, and /etc/vmsyslog.conf.d/*.conf files, now resides in the ConfigStore database. You can modify this configuration only by using ESXCLI commands, and not by editing files. For more information, see VMware knowledge base articles 82637 and 82638.
• VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes statistics for better debugging: With ESXi 7.0 Update 2, you can track performance statistics for vSphere Virtual Volumes to quickly identify issues such as latency in third-party VASA provider responses. By using a set of commands, you can get statistics for all VASA providers in your system, or for a specified namespace or entity in the given namespace, or enable statistics tracking for the complete namespace. For more information, see Collecting Statistical Information for vVols.
• NVIDIA Ampere architecture support: vSphere 7.0 Update 2 adds support for the NVIDIA Ampere architecture that enables you to perform high end AI/ML training, and ML inference workloads, by using the accelerated capacity of the A100 GPU. In addition, vSphere 7.0 Update 2 improves GPU sharing and utilization by supporting the Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) technology. With vSphere 7.0 Update 2, you also see enhanced performance of device-to-device communication, building on the existing NVIDIA GPUDirect functionality, by enabling Address Translation Services (ATS) and Access Control Services (ACS) at the PCIe bus layer in the ESXi kernel.  Read more here…

• Support for Mellanox ConnectX-6 200G NICs: ESXi 7.0 Update 2 supports Mellanox Technologies MT28908 Family (ConnectX-6) and Mellanox Technologies MT2892 Family (ConnectX-6 Dx) 200G NICs.
• Performance improvements for AMD Zen CPUs: With ESXi 7.0 Update 2, out-of-the-box optimizations can increase AMD Zen CPU performance by up to 30% in various benchmarks. The updated ESXi scheduler takes full advantage of the AMD NUMA architecture to make the most appropriate placement decisions for virtual machines and containers. AMD Zen CPU optimizations allow a higher number of VMs or container deployments with better performance.
• Reduced compute and I/O latency, and jitter for latency sensitive workloads: Latency sensitive workloads, such as in financial and telecom applications, can see significant performance benefit from I/O latency and jitter optimizations in ESXi 7.0 Update 2. The optimizations reduce interference and jitter sources to provide a consistent runtime environment. With ESXi 7.0 Update 2, you can also see higher speed in interrupt delivery for passthrough devices.
• Confidential vSphere Pods on a Supervisor Cluster in vSphere with Tanzu: Starting with vSphere 7.0 Update 2, you can run confidential vSphere Pods, keeping guest OS memory encrypted and protected against access from the hypervisor, on a Supervisor Cluster in vSphere with Tanzu. You can configure confidential vSphere Pods by adding Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Encrypted State (SEV-ES) as an extra security enhancement. For more information, see Deploy a Confidential vSphere Pod.
• vSphere Lifecycle Manager fast upgrades: Starting with vSphere 7.0 Update 2, you can significantly reduce upgrade time and system downtime, and minimize system boot time, by suspending virtual machines to memory and using the Quick Boot functionality. You can configure vSphere Lifecycle Manager to suspend virtual machines to memory instead of migrating them, powering them off, or suspending them to disk when you update an ESXi host. For more information, see Configuring vSphere Lifecycle Manager for Fast Upgrades.
• Encrypted Fault Tolerance log traffic: Starting with vSphere 7.0 Update 2, you can encrypt Fault Tolerance log traffic to get enhanced security. vSphere Fault Tolerance performs frequent checks between the primary and secondary VMs to enable quick resumption from the last successful checkpoint. The checkpoint contains the VM state that has been modified since the previous checkpoint. Encrypting the log traffic prevents malicious access or network attacks.

• In the Lifecycle Manager plug-in of the vSphere Client, the release date for the ESXi 7.0.2 base image, profiles, and components is 2021-02-17. This is expected. To ensure you can use correct filters by release date, only the release date of the rollup bulletin is 2021-03-09.
• Starting with vSphere 7.0, VMware uses components for packaging VIBs along with bulletins. The ESXi and esx-update bulletins are dependent on each other. Always include both in a single ESXi host patch baseline or include the rollup bulletin in the baseline to avoid failure during host patching.
• When patching ESXi hosts by using VMware Update Manager from a version prior to ESXi 7.0 Update 2, it is strongly recommended to use the rollup bulletin in the patch baseline. If you cannot use the rollup bulletin, be sure to include all of the following packages in the patching baseline. If the following packages are not included in the baseline, the update operation fails:
  • VMware-vmkusb_0.1-1vmw.701.0.0.16850804 or higher
  • VMware-vmkata_0.1-1vmw.701.0.0.16850804 or higher
  • VMware-vmkfcoe_1.0.0.2-1vmw.701.0.0.16850804 or higher
  • VMware-NVMeoF-RDMA_1.0.1.2-1vmw.701.0.0.16850804 or higher

Product Support Notices

• Removal of SHA1 from Secure Shell (SSH): In vSphere 7.0 Update 2, the SHA-1 cryptographic hashing algorithm is removed from the SSHD default configuration.
• Standard formats of log files and syslog transmissions: In a future major ESXi release, VMware plans to standardize the formats of all ESXi log files and syslog transmissions. This standardization affects the metadata associated with each log file line or syslog transmission. For example, the time stamp, programmatic source identifier, message severity, and operation identifier data. For more information, visit https://core.vmware.com/esxi-log-message-formats. 

• Upgrade paths possible from ESXi 6.5 U2+

Impact on ESXi upgrade due to expired ESXi VIB Certificate (76555)

Refer to the Interoperability Matrix for more product support notices.

vSphere Storage  |  vSphere Security  |  vSphere Resource Management  |  vSphere Availability  |  Monitoring & Performance

vSphere Single Host Management – VMware Host Client

Introducing the vSphere Native Key Provider

ESXi Log Message Formats

Introduction to vSphere Native Key Provider video (9 min video)

Explore the new security features of vSphere, including the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 for ESXi, the Virtual TPM 2.0 for virtual machines (VM), and support for Microsoft Virtualization Based Security (VBS)

HOL-2111-05-SDC – VMware vSphere Automation and Development – API and SDK

The vSphere Automation API and SDK are developer-friendly and have simplified interfaces.