New Tanzu/CNS Features in vSphere 8 U1

Supervisor Services are now available on vDS based Supervisors.

Previously, the availability of Supervisor Services was restricted to NSX based Supervisors only. Now deployment of Harbor, Contour, S3 object storage, and Velero Supervisor Services are available in vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS) based Supervisors. Note: Supervisor Service capabilities require an ESXi update to 8.0 U1. This provides customers with more network flexibility when deploying Supervisor Service capabilities.

VM Service Support for all Linux Images.

Users may use CloudInit to customize any Linux image in OVF format conformant to image specification for deployment using the VM Service as well as utilize OVF templating through vAppConfig to enable the deployment of legacy Linux images.

Web-Console Support for VM Service VMs.

After deploying a VM Service VM, a user can now launch a web-console session for the VM using kubectl CLI to enable troubleshooting and debugging within the guest without the involvement of the admin persona to gain access to the guest VM. This helps DevOps admins in debugging systems directly from their kubectl interface.

Support for Thick Provisioning of PVs in CNS using SPBM policies on VMFS Datastore

Users may now provision thick CNS volumes on vmfs Datastores. This feature also enables users to convert the existing disk format of CNS volumes from thin to thick without disrupting the workloads. This feature is available for both CNS Vanilla and Tanzu/WCP customers.

vSAN 8 U1 Helps Customers with Their Next Generations and Cloud-Native Workloads

vSAN provides customers with a rich set of Cloud Native storage capabilities. Containers using vSAN can consume persistent storage via block or file. Block-based persistent volumes can be used by a single pod (read write once, or RWO). NFS file shares served up by vSAN file services can be mounted from several pods (Read Write Many, or RWM). Both can be managed directly from the vCenter UI. With vSAN, and vVols, you can manage your PVs using Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) simplifying the daily operations of your K8s storage management.

With vSAN 8 U1, support of Cloud Native Storage comes to the vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA).  This provides customers with the latest performance and capabilities using vSAN ESA. Customers now have the option to use either vSAN OSA or ESA architectures.

vSAN 8 U1 lowers the barrier in cost and complexity by now making our Data Persistence platform (DPp) solutions compatible with a common VMware vSphere Distributed Switch. An environment will no longer be required to use VMware NSX-T to support the network connectivity requirements by applications that use the DPp.  This enhancement applies to both the vSAN OSA and ESA for maximum flexibility.

With vSAN 8 U1, persistent volumes can be programmatically provisioned as “thick” by the developer by defining it in the storage class.  vSAN Direct Configuration will honor this setting and ensure the persistent volumes created are associated with that storage class will be thick provisioned.  This will help make capacity management easier for developers and administrators alike.

To learn more about Tanzu/CNS, you can start here: VMware vSphere with Tanzu | VMware

To learn more about the latest vSAN updates, you can start here: vSAN Blog | VMware