ESXi 7.0 Update 1 | ISO Build 16850804

VMware vSAN 7.0 Update 1 | Build 16850804

• vSphere Accessibility Enhancements: vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1 comes with significant accessibility enhancements based on recommendations by the Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR), which is the internationally accepted standard.  Read more
• vSphere Ideas Portal: With vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1, any user with a valid my.vmware.com account can submit feature requests by using the vSphere Ideas portal. Read more
• Enhanced vSphere Lifecycle Manager hardware compatibility pre-checks for vSAN environments: vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1 adds vSphere Lifecycle Manager hardware compatibility pre-checks. Read more
• Increased scalability with vSphere Lifecycle Manager​: For vSphere Lifecycle Manager​ operations with ESXi hosts and clusters is up to:
  • 64 supported clusters from 15
  • 96 supported ESXi hosts within a cluster from 64. For vSAN environments, the limit is still 64
  • 280 supported ESXi hosts managed by a vSphere Lifecycle Manager Image from 150
  • 64 clusters on which you can run remediation in parallel, if you initiate remediation at a data center level, from 15

• vSphere Lifecycle Manager support for coordinated upgrades between availability zones: With vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1, to prevent overlapping operations, vSphere Lifecycle Manager updates fault domains in vSAN clusters in a sequence. ESXi hosts within each fault domain are still updated in a rolling fashion. For vSAN stretched clusters, the first fault domain is always the preferred site.
• Extended list of supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu versions for the VMware vSphere Update Manager Download Service (UMDS): vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1 adds new Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu versions that UMDS supports. For the complete list of supported versions, see Supported Linux-Based Operating Systems for Installing UMDS.
• Silence Alerts button in VMware Skyline Health – With vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1, you can stop alerts for certain health checks, such as notifications for known issues, by using the Silence Alerts button.  Read more
• Configure SMTP authentication: vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1 adds support to SMTP authentication in the vCenter Server Appliance to enable sending alerts and alarms by email in secure mode. Configure Mail Sender Settings.   Read more
• System virtual machines for vSphere Cluster Services: In vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1, vSphere Cluster Services adds a set of system virtual machines in every vSphere cluster to ensure the healthy operation of VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler. For more information, see VMware knowledge base articles KB80472, KB79892 and KB80483.
• Licensing for VMware Tanzu Basic: With vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1, licensing for VMware Tanzu Basic splits into separate license keys for vSphere 7 Enterprise Plus and VMware Tanzu Basic. In vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1, you must provide either a vSphere 7 Enterprise Plus license key or a vSphere 7 Enterprise Plus with an add-on for Kubernetes license key to enable the Enterprise Plus functionality for ESXi hosts. In addition, you must provide a VMware Tanzu Basic license key to enable Kubernetes functionality for all ESXi hosts that you want to use as part of a Supervisor Cluster.
  When you upgrade a 7.0 deployment to 7.0 Update 1, existing Supervisor Clusters automatically start a 60-day evaluation mode. If you do not install a VMware Tanzu Basic license key and assign it to existing Supervisor Clusters within 60 days, you see some limitations in the Kubernetes functionality. For more information, see Licensing for vSphere with Tanzu and VMware knowledge base article KB80868.
• For VMware vSphere with Tanzu updates, see VMware vSphere with Tanzu Release Notes.

If the LACP mode is set to basic, indicating One Link Aggregation Control Protocol (singleLag), the distributed virtual port groups on the vSphere Distributed Switch might lose connection after the upgrade and affect the management vmknic, if it is on one of the dvPort groups. During the upgrade precheck, you see an error such as Source vCenter Server has instance(s) of Distributed Virtual Switch at unsupported lacpApiVersion.

For more information on converting to Enhanced LACP Support on a vSphere Distributed Switch, see VMware knowledge base article 2051311. For more information on the limitations of LACP in vSphere, see VMware knowledge base article 2051307.

Product Support Notices

• vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1 does not support VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.3.1.
• Deprecation of Server Message Block (SMB) protocol version 1.0
  File-based backup and restore of vCenter Server by using Server Message Block (SMB) protocol version 1.0 is deprecated in vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1. Removal of SMBv.1 is due in a future vSphere release.
• End of General Support for ​VMware Tools 9.10.x and 10.0.x  VMware Product Lifecycle Matrix
• Deprecation of the VMware Service Lifecycle Manager API
  VMware plans to deprecate the VMware Service Lifecycle Manager API (vmonapi service) in a future release. For more information, see VMware knowledge base article 80775.
• End of support for Internet Explorer 11
  Removal of Internet Explorer 11 from the list of supported browsers for the vSphere Client is due in a future vSphere release.
• VMware Host Client in maintenance mode

• ESXi 7.0 Update 1 supports vSphere Quick Boot on the following servers:

• • HPE ProLiant BL460c Gen9
  • HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10 Plus
  • HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen9
  • HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Plus
  • HPE ProLiant XL225n Gen10 Plus
  • HPE Synergy 480 Gen9
• Enhanced vSphere Lifecycle Manager hardware compatibility pre-checks for vSAN environments: ESXi 7.0 Update 1 adds vSphere Lifecycle Manager hardware compatibility pre-checks. The pre-checks automatically trigger after certain change events such as modification of the cluster desired image or addition of a new ESXi host in vSAN environments. Also, the hardware compatibility framework automatically polls the Hardware Compatibility List database at predefined intervals for changes that trigger pre-checks as necessary.
• Increased number of vSphere Lifecycle Manager concurrent operations on clusters: With ESXi 7.0 Update 1, if you initiate remediation at a data center level, the number of clusters on which you can run remediation in parallel, increases from 15 to 64 clusters.
• vSphere Lifecycle Manager support for coordinated updates between availability zones: With ESXi 7.0 Update 1, to prevent overlapping operations, vSphere Lifecycle Manager updates fault domains in vSAN clusters in a sequence. ESXi hosts within each fault domain are still updated in a rolling fashion. For vSAN stretched clusters, the first fault domain is always the preferred site.
• Extended list of supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu versions for the VMware vSphere Update Manager Download Service (UMDS): ESXi 7.0 Update 1 adds new Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu versions that UMDS supports. For the complete list of supported versions, see Supported Linux-Based Operating Systems for Installing UMDS.
• Improved control of VMware Tools time synchronization: With ESXi 7.0 Update 1, you can select a VMware Tools time synchronization mode from the vSphere Client instead of using the command prompt. When you navigate to VM Options > VMware Tools > Synchronize Time with Host, you can select Synchronize at startup and resume (recommended), Synchronize time periodically, or, if no option is selected, you can prevent synchronization.
• Increased Support for Multi-Processor Fault Tolerance (SMP-FT) maximums: With ESXi 7.0 Update 1, you can configure more SMP-FT VMs, and more total SMP-FT vCPUs in an ESXi host, or a cluster, depending on your workloads and capacity planning.
• Virtual hardware version 18: ESXi Update 7.0 Update 1 introduces virtual hardware version 18 to enable support for virtual machines with higher resource maximums, and:
• • Secure Encrypted Virtualization – Encrypted State (SEV-ES)
  • Virtual remote direct memory access (vRDMA) native endpoints
  • EVC Graphics Mode (vSGA).
• Increased resource maximums for virtual machines and performance enhancements:
• • With ESXi 7.0 Update 1, you can create virtual machines with three times more virtual CPUs and four times more memory to enable applications with larger memory and CPU footprint to scale in an almost linear fashion, comparable with bare metal. Virtual machine resource maximums are up to 768 vCPUs from 256 vCPUs, and to 24 TB of virtual RAM from 6 TB. Still, not over-committing memory remains a best practice. Only virtual machines with hardware version 18 and operating systems supporting such large configurations can be set up with these resource maximums.
  • Performance enhancements in ESXi that support the larger scale of virtual machines include widening of the physical address, address space optimizations, better NUMA awareness for guest virtual machines, and more scalable synchronization techniques. vSphere vMotion is also optimized to work with the larger virtual machine configurations.
  • ESXi hosts with AMD processors can support virtual machines with twice more vCPUs, 256, and up to 8 TB of RAM.
  • Persistent memory (PMEM) support is up twofold to 12 TB from 6 TB for both Memory Mode and App Direct Mode.

The typical way to apply patches to ESXi 7.x hosts is by using the vSphere Lifecycle Manager. For details, see About vSphere Lifecycle Manager and vSphere Lifecycle Manager Baselines and Images.

You can also update ESXi hosts without using the Lifecycle Manager plug-in, and use an image profile instead. To do this, you must manually download the patch offline bundle ZIP file from the VMware download page or the Product Patches page and use the esxcli software profile command.
For more information, see the Upgrading Hosts by Using ESXCLI Commands and the VMware ESXi Upgrade guide.

Scale Without Compromise

• HCI Mesh. HCI Mesh is a software-based approach for disaggregation of compute and storage resources in vSAN. HCI Mesh brings together multiple independent vSAN clusters by enabling cross-cluster utilization of remote datastore capacity within vCenter Server. HCI Mesh enables you to efficiently utilize and consume data center resources, which provides simple storage management at scale.
• vSAN File Service enhancements. Native vSAN File Service includes support for SMB file shares. Support for Microsoft Active Directory, Kerberos authentication, and scalability improvements also are available.
• Compression-only vSAN. You can enable compression independently of deduplication, which provides a storage efficiency option for workloads that cannot take advantage of deduplication. With compression-only vSAN, a failed capacity device only impacts that device and not the entire disk group.
• Increased usable capacity. Internal optimizations allow vSAN to no longer need the 25-30% of free space available for internal operations and host failure rebuilds. The amount of space required is a deterministic value based on deployment variables, such as size of the cluster and density of storage devices. These changes provide more usable capacity for workloads.
• Shared witness for two-node clusters. vSAN 7.0 Update 1 enables a single vSAN witness host to manage multiple two-node clusters. A single witness host can support up to 64 clusters, which greatly reduces operational and resource overhead.

Simplify Operations

• vSAN Data-in-Transit encryption. This feature enables secure over the wire encryption of data traffic between nodes in a vSAN cluster. vSAN data-in-transit encryption is a cluster-wide feature and can be enabled independently or along with vSAN data-at-rest encryption. Traffic encryption uses the same FIPS-2 validated cryptographic module as existing encryption features and does not require use of a KMS server.
• Enhanced data durability during maintenance mode. This improvement protects the integrity of data when you place a host into maintenance mode with the Ensure Accessibility option. All incremental writes which would have been written to the host in maintenance are now redirected to another host, if one is available. This feature benefits VMs that have PFTT=1 configured, and also provides an alternative to using PFTT=2 for ensuring data integrity during maintenance operations
• vLCM enhancements. vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) is a solution for unified software and firmware lifecycle management. In this release, vLCM is enhanced with firmware support for Lenovo ReadyNodes, awareness of vSAN stretched cluster and fault domain configurations, additional hardware compatibility pre-checks, and increased scalability for concurrent cluster operations.
• Reserved capacity. You can enable capacity reservations for internal cluster operations and host failure rebuilds. Reservations are soft-thresholds designed to prevent user-driven provisioning activity from interfering with internal operations, such as data rebuilds, rebalancing activity, or policy re-configurations.
• Default gateway override. You can override the default gateway for VMkernel adapter to provide a different gateway for vSAN network. This feature simplifies routing configuration for stretched clusters, two-node clusters, and fault domain deployments that previously required manual configuration of static routes. Static routing is not necessary
• Faster vSAN host restarts. The time interval for a planned host restart has been reduced by persisting in-memory metadata to disk before the restart or shutdown. This method reduces the time required for hosts in a vSAN cluster to restart, which decreases the overall cluster downtime during maintenance windows.
• Workload I/O analysis. Analyze VM I/O metrics with IOInsight, a monitoring and troubleshooting tool that is integrated directly into vCenter Server. Gain a detailed view of VM I/O characteristics such as performance, I/O size and type, read/write ratio, and other important data metrics. You can run IOInsight operations against VMs, hosts, or the entire cluster
• Consolidated I/O performance view. You can select multiple VMs, and display a combined view of storage performance metrics such as IOPS, throughput, and latency. You can compare storage performance characteristics across multiple VMs.
• VM latency monitoring with IOPS limits. This improvement in performance monitoring helps you distinguish the periods of latency that can occur due to enforced IOPS limits. This view can help organizations that set IOPS limits in VM storage policies.
• Secure drive erase. Securely wipe flash storage devices before decommissioning from a vSAN cluster through a set of new PowerCLI or API commands. Use these commands to safely erase data in accordance to NIST standards
• Data migration pre-check for disks. vSAN’s data migration pre-check for host maintenance mode now includes support for individual disk devices or entire disk groups. This offers more granular pre-checks for disk or disk group decommissioning.
• VPAT section 508 compliant. vSAN is compliant with the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT). VPAT section 508 compliance ensures that vSAN had a thorough audit of accessibility requirements, and has instituted product changes for proper compliance.

 Note: vSAN 7.0 Update 1 improves CPU performance by standardizing task timers throughout the system. This change addresses issues with timers activating earlier or later than requested, resulting in degraded performance for some workloads.

Note: Before performing the upgrade, please review the most recent version of the VMware Compatibility Guide to validate that the latest vSAN version is available for your platform.

vSAN 7.0 Update 1 is a new release that requires a full upgrade to vSphere 7.0 Update 1. Perform the following tasks to complete the upgrade:

1. Upgrade to vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1. For more information, see the VMware vSphere 7.0 Update 1 Release Notes.
2. Upgrade hosts to ESXi 7.0 Update 1. For more information, see the VMware vSphere 7.0 Update 1 Release Notes.
3. Upgrade the vSAN on-disk format to version 13.0. If upgrading from on-disk format version 3.0 or later, no data evacuation is required (metadata update only).

 Note: vSAN retired disk format version 1.0 in vSAN 7.0 Update 1. Disks running disk format version 1.0 are no longer recognized by vSAN. vSAN will block upgrade through vSphere Update Manager, ISO install, or esxcli to vSAN 7.0 Update 1. To avoid these issues, upgrade disks running disk format version 1.0 to a higher version. If you have disks on version 1, a health check alerts you to upgrade the disk format version.

Disk format version 1.0 does not have performance and snapshot enhancements, and it lacks support for advanced features including checksum, deduplication and compression, and encryption. For more information about vSAN disk format version, see KB2145267.

Upgrading the On-disk Format for Hosts with Limited Capacity

During an upgrade of the vSAN on-disk format from version 1.0 or 2.0, a disk group evacuation is performed. The disk group is removed and upgraded to on-disk format version 13.0, and the disk group is added back to the cluster. For two-node or three-node clusters, or clusters without enough capacity to evacuate each disk group, select Allow Reduced Redundancy from the vSphere Client. You also can use the following RVC command to upgrade the on-disk format: vsan.ondisk_upgrade –allow-reduced-redundancy

When you allow reduced redundancy, your VMs are unprotected for the duration of the upgrade, because this method does not evacuate data to the other hosts in the cluster. It removes each disk group, upgrades the on-disk format, and adds the disk group back to the cluster. All objects remain available, but with reduced redundancy.

If you enable deduplication and compression during the upgrade to vSAN 7.0 Update 1, you can select Allow Reduced Redundancy from the vSphere Client.

Limitations

For information about maximum configuration limits for the vSAN 7.0 Update 1 release, see the Configuration Maximums  documentation.

Resolved Issues  |  Known Issues

Resource Management  |   Availability  |  Monitoring & Performance

Upgrading the vSAN Cluster   Before You Upgrade   Upgrading vCenter Server  Upgrading Hosts

Interoperability Matrix ESXi  |  Interoperability Matrix vSAN  |  Configuration Maximums vSAN  |  Ports Used vSAN

Announcing the ESXi-Arm Fling  |  In-Product Evaluation of vSphere with Tanzu

vSphere 7 Update 1 – Unprecedented Scalability

YouTube A Quick Look at What’s New in vSphere 7 Update 1  |  vSphere with Tanzu Overview in 3 Minutes

VMware vSphere with Tanzu webpage  |  eBook: Deliver Developer-Ready Infrastructure Using vSphere with Tanzu

What’s New in vSAN 7 Update 1   |  PM’s Blog, Cormac vSAN 7.0 Update 1

(Free Account Needed)

Certificate Management in vSphere [HCP2050]      |     Connect vSAN Capacity Across Clusters with VMware HCI Mesh [DEM3206]

Deep Dive: vSphere 7 Developer Center [HCP1211]    |

More vSphere & vSAN VMworld Sessions

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VMware vSphere – What’s New [HOL-2111-95-ISM]

What’s New in vSAN – Getting Started [HOL-2108-95-ISM]