Source: blogs.vmware.com
VMware by Broadcom created VMware vSphere Foundation as an enterprise workload engine with intelligent operations to optimize IT infrastructure in organizations of all sizes. It increases workload productivity, improves security and accelerates innovation.
VMware continues to address the challenges of organizations with VMware vSphere Foundation 5.2, a new version of the popular solution.
Top Highlights of New Features in VVF 5.2
Streamlined IT operations with a powerful new console
The new console experience provides visibility into the health of your infrastructure stack and enables timely action to resolve issues. The console provides a single control plane for all administrative tasks across the entire infrastructure. The new console is built on top of the vCenter look and feel, giving administrators a familiar experience to speed up deployments.
Features of the new console:
- Consolidated diagnostics – which provide admins a streamlined mechanism to quickly identify issues and act on automated recommendations to remediate them.
- Single sign on – across all VVF components for ease of operations and enforcing security.
- Centralized certificate management – enables identifying and tracking all digital certificates by administrators for monitoring the health of the certificates and for compliance.
- Unified Licensing – give customers a single place to manage license keys across deployments, and also provides a point-in-time and historical view of license consumption.
The new console provides customers with the following key benefits:
- Easier configuration, management and operations of VVF deployments
- Simplified operations using automated tasks
- Unified, holistic experience for compute and storage for VVF
Faster upgrades and no downtime with ESXi Live Patching
With the new Live Patching capability in ESXi, customers can fix critical errors in the virtual machine runtime and apply patches to all components without rebooting or evacuating the virtual machine. Virtual machines are Fast-Suspend-Resumed as part of the host recovery process. In doing so, the host enters partial maintenance mode, a new version of the mount is downloaded and patched, and then the virtual machine is quickly suspended and resumed to use the patched version of the mount. This action does not interfere with most virtual machines!
ESXi Live Patching delivers the following key benefits to customers:
- Non-disruptive patches, so no need for maintenance windows
- Ability to deliver critical fixes quickly within required SLAs, enabling improved security
- Enhanced system reliability with seamless lifecycle integration
Empower developers and consumers with an advanced self-service infrastructure
With vSphere Foundation 5.2, developers can provision and manage their own Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resources. This release introduces the new vSphere IaaS Control Panel, which builds on the vSphere Panel with Tanzu and extends its functionality with new and improved IaaS capabilities. Resource provisioning is made easier with services such as VM Service, Storage Service, the new independent TKG service, and a variety of other services available through Supervisor in vSphere. This enables developers and consumers to quickly and easily leverage the resources needed to build and deploy applications without relying on IT teams for manual provisioning and configuration.
With a new user interface available in vCenter called the Local Consumption Interface, vSphere Foundation empowers developers to work more efficiently and effectively, accelerating the development and deployment of new applications and services.
New independent TKG service
The new independent TKG service decouples Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) releases from vCenter, allowing for asynchronous updates that are consistent with Kubernetes releases from the main stream. This enables customers to upgrade the TKG service independently of the standard vSphere upgrade cycle, providing access to the latest Kubernetes enhancements, greater flexibility, and better control over Kubernetes deployments.
These new capabilities provide customers with the following key benefits:
- Alignment with Upstream Kubernetes: Ensures TKG service stays current with the latest features, bug fixes, and security patches by aligning with upstream Kubernetes versions, independent of vSphere release cycles.
- Flexibility in Update Timing: Allows for asynchronous updates, providing organizations with the ability to implement updates at their own pace, reducing disruptions and maintaining continuous operations.
- Streamlined Management: Simplifies the management process by using vSphere services to manage TKG versions, offering a centralized platform for orchestrating Kubernetes deployments and enhancing operational efficiency.
Local consumption interface
The new Local Consumption Interface (LCI) in vSphere provides a new and simplified admin panel to access all vSphere IaaS management layer services. vSphere offers a user interface for creating virtual machines, TKG clusters, load balancers, and Persistent Volume Claims. This new interface is available in vCenter for each individual namespace. The user interface supports complex specifications for virtual machines and TKG clusters, while generating YAML for users who wish to interact directly with the API.
Additional new features in vSphere Foundation 5.2
Here are some of the other features that are also available in vSphere Foundation 5.2.
Improve operational efficiency:
- Intelligent alerts clustering: Alert flooding is a common situation IT admins face as result of using multiple monitoring tools which result in multiple alerts for the same problem. IT administrators must sift through thousands of alerts to filter out the noise and focus on key issues. IThis feature provides a unification of alerts across a timeline for faster troubleshooting.
Accelerate innovation:
- Support for Supervisor on vSAN stretched clusters: is one of the most request configurations and with this feature, Supervisors can be deployed on vSAN stretched clusters spanning two physcial locations or sites.
Supercharge Workload Performance:
- Kubernetes clusters autoscaling: allows Kubernetes clusters to reflect demand, scale down nodes that are underutilized and scale them back up when demand increases, for better utilization of the Kubernetes clusters.
- vGPU heterogeneous profile support: With this release, multiple vGPU profile types and different memory sizes are now options for supported GPUs, and allows for more effectively sharing HGPU resources.
Elevate Security:
- Single sign on: Currently, each VVF component has its own authentication source with no shared authentication context across the services. This feature provides Single Sign On between all the VVF components using the vCenter- hosted VMware identity broker.
Watch the What’s New in VMware vSphere Foundation webinar:
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