#086 - What's New in vSphere 8.0?

Data Center Therapy

You! Yes, you! Running vSphere 6.5 or 6.7? We understand, you’re busy!

For many, many reasons, you couldn’t get around to upgrading your systems to 7.0 when VMware deprecated support for 6.7 and 6.5 on October 15th, 2022.

So now you’re at a cross roads. vSphere 8 is out, but fairly new, and comes with its own set of new hardware requirements. Assuming your existing hardware meets them, do you upgrade to vSphere 7 or vSphere 8? If instead you get new hosts, should you run ESXi 7 or 8 on them? And what if you’re already running vSphere 7? Should you upgrade to 8?

It’s a been a little while, but your favorite, most empathetic, most wise and most entertaining IT therapists are back in the office to look at all things vSphere 8. In this episode of Data Center Therapy, your intrepid hosts Matt ‘Pi before Pi was cool’ Yette and Matt ‘Distributed Everything Si-fu’ Cozzolino teach you with their technology equivalents of the martial art of Wing Chun on what’s new with vSphere 8.

In this episode, you, our treasured watchers (DCT is now on YouTube!) and our listeners, will get to learn about:

• How mature ESXi 7.0 is, when it came out, and how relatively rare PSODs are now
• What some of the implications of the new hardware requirements are for ESXi 8, and how boot media and types have changed since ESXi 7 appeared
• What new concepts and hardware support exists in ESXi 8, what Distributed Processing Units (DPUs) do and how AI/ML and hardware consumption models are managed inside vCenter
• What changes have taken place in the Lifecycle Manager of vCenter to make things easier to update and upgrade (both on the ESXi front, as well as the firmware of the systems ESXi is deployed on!)
• How regions and availability zone concepts, once solely in cloud hosting providers, has trickled down into the vSphere command-and-control paradigms as well as Tanzu’s current state of integration

As the Matts state in this episode, it’s not too late to join “Professor” Cozzolino in his Introduction to vSphere 8 class March 21st through 24th, and his Advanced vSphere 8 class April 18th through 21st. If you need to know “how” to operate your systems, the Intro class is likely the best choice for you. If you’d like to know the “why” of best practices in vSphere, then the Advanced class is the best choice for you. To get registered ASAP, talk to your IVOXY Account Manager and we’ll be happy to assist right away.

As always, be sure to like, share and subscribe wherever you found this episode of Data Center Therapy. If you need assistance planning or executing your own organization’s vSphere upgrades, please reach out to your IVOXY Account Manager.

In the meantime, stay up to date, stay supported, stay stable and optimized (as we like our ESXi hosts to be), and stay informed, DCT friends! Talk to you on our next fresh episode!