vSphere 8 introduces notable scalability enhancements over vSphere 7, although many core specifications remain unchanged, as vSphere 7 had already pushed the limits of the platform. Key metrics such as vMem, vCPU per VM, and pCPU per host remain the same. However, there are significant improvements in other areas: the number of vGPUs per VM has doubled, and the Lifecycle Manager can now manage up to 1,000 hosts. Additionally, the maximum number of VMs per cluster has increased to 10,000. Another major upgrade is in VMDirectPath I/O support each host can now handle up to 32 devices, up from the previous limit of 8. These devices, including NICs and GPUs, can share a common PCIe switch or be directly connected. vSphere 8 also introduces new Device Virtualization Extensions (DVX), further enhancing hardware flexibility and virtualization capabilities.
In earlier versions of vSphere, virtual machines that accessed physical hardware through direct I/O were restricted in terms of mobility. With the introduction of Device Virtualization Extensions (DVX), VMware provides a new API and framework that allows hardware-assisted VMs to fully support features such as vMotion, DRS, HA, as well as suspend and resume operations. DVX also enables compatibility with disk and memory snapshots.
One challenge in virtual machine emulation involves the use of TPM (Trusted Platform Module) devices, which can introduce potential security risks. To address this, VMware now allows administrators to choose whether to copy or replace a VM’s TPM device during cloning. By selecting the Replace option, the cloned VM is provisioned with a completely new TPM, ensuring it does not inherit or have access to sensitive data or secrets from the original VM.
What’s New in vSphere 8
VMware vSphere 8 is the enterprise workload platform that brings the benefits of cloud to on-premises workloads. It supercharges performance with DPU and GPU based acceleration, enhances operational efficiency through the VMware Cloud Console, seamlessly integrates with add-on hybrid cloud services, and accelerates innovation with an enterprise-ready integrated Kubernetes runtime that runs containers alongside VMs.
vSphere Enterprise Plus:
HG00K-03H8K-48929-8K1NP-3LUJ4
4F40H-4ML1K-M89U0-0C2N4-1AKL4
vCenter Standard:
4F282-0MLD2-M8869-T89G0-CF240
0F41K-0MJ4H-M88U1-0C3N0-0A214
VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi ISO) image
File size: 605.74 MB
File type: iso
Name: VMware-VMvisor-Installer-8.0U2b-23305546.x86_64.iso
Release Date: 2024-02-29
Build Number: 23305546
Boot your server with this image in order to install or upgrade to ESXi (ESXi requires 64-bit capable servers). This ESXi image includes VMware Tools.
MD5SUM: bc300833a34521e99457116a27dd38dd
SHA1SUM: 9b35bfd21f7c375fa43989b7a8f529cdc90ef8c8
SHA256SUM: 42557a32b77bf6f66119c80d1055cc042544872672319097dcd98f5a06002527