VMware has a lot of vSphere related announcements for their next big update, which is vSphere 8 Update 2. It is scheduled to be released Q3 2023 so that’s just around the corner. Core product announcements are usually my favorite because they touch the daily work for all VMware admins.

I know we all want to keep our vCenters running the latest version, but it can be tough to coordinate downtime with 7+ patches every year. It can easily take one hour for each upgrade in a medium sized environment. Keep in mind that the following doesn’t apply to vCenters in ELM and HA at the moment. Now there’s reduced downtime for upgrades of vCenter. It will only be down for about 5 minutes! This is accomplished due to the following. A new vCenter server is deployed with a temporary IP address, even for a minor patch. Data is copied from the old to new vCenter. Then the short downtime occurs when switching over and starting up services. On top of that, there’s an automatic LVM snapshot taken during patching, which can be resumed on a failure or rolled back. Being able to resume is nice because sometimes a upgrade fails for a very minor reason and need to start over. Now can fix it and resume the upgrade.

Renewing or replacing certificates has never been fun, but there’s been improvements over the past few years. Now there’s a new enhancement that everyone will appreciate. vCenter certs can now be renewed or replaced without restarting services so no downtime.

This next enhancement is useful if stuck in a bad situation with your vDS not being synced up with all hosts. This can happen when a backup is taken, a vDS change occurs, and then a restore. You will no longer have vDS inconsistencies when restoring from a backup. vDS changes will be pushed from cluster(s) to vCenter. This is also supported with a vDS using NSX.

At a previous job, I have had Microsoft engineers not thrilled with no vCenter identity provider federation support with Entra ID.  By the way, Microsoft recently changed Azure AD to now be called Entra ID. Now Entra ID is supported and all existing identity providers are still available. There’s another great addition on the Microsoft side. Adding an AD OU path is an option when going through the VM customization wizard. No more computer objects going to the computers container or automation needed outside of the wizard to do this.

I think we have all been in a situation where a backup or something has a lock on a VMDK. Then it’s a pain to track it down via CLI and logs. Now there is a detailed error message when a file is locked with the IP address and MAC of the host holding the file lock.

With AI and ML getting bigger and bigger, GPUs need to have better features at the hypervisor level. There have always been many caveats with a VM having a vGPU enabled. Now there has been further improvements with placement for vGPU enabled VMs. DRS now makes better deployment decisions with an initial placement of a VM. Also, vGPU enabled VMs are automatically migrated when needed to accommodate for larger VMs. There’s one other addition that I think is cool for vGPU enabled VMs. No more guessing how much time a user will be affected with a vMotion. You can now view a stun time estimate in edit settings of a VM.

Whenever there’s a big update, you can expect a new VM hardware version to be released. Now up to version 21.

Those are the features and improvements that I am looking forward to most in vSphere 8 Update 2, but wait, there’s more. There are many other advancements, such on the DevOps side. Give it a try on a VMware Hands-on Lab and check out VMware’s documentation for further details.