Introducing VMware vSphere 6.7!

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RyC

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Oct 17, 2013
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It's finally happened :(

Comparing the processors supported by vSphere 6.5, vSphere 6.7 no longer supports the following processors:
  • AMD Opteron 13xx Series
  • AMD Opteron 23xx Series
  • AMD Opteron 24xx Series
  • AMD Opteron 41xx Series
  • AMD Opteron 61xx Series
  • AMD Opteron 83xx Series
  • AMD Opteron 84xx Series
  • Intel Core i7-620LE Processor
  • Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series
  • Intel Xeon 31xx Series
  • Intel Xeon 33xx Series
  • Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series
  • Intel Xeon 34xx Lynnfield Series
  • Intel Xeon 35xx Series
  • Intel Xeon 36xx Series
  • Intel Xeon 52xx Series
  • Intel Xeon 54xx Series
  • Intel Xeon 55xx Series
  • Intel Xeon 56xx Series
  • Intel Xeon 65xx Series
  • Intel Xeon 74xx Series
  • Intel Xeon 75xx Series
 

Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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Quick reboots, performance improvements, TPM support will all be nice to have. I don’t think many people even hear will miss Xeon 55xx/56xx support will they ? Can also always stay at an older release until it’s hardware upgrade time.
 

cheezehead

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Sep 23, 2012
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Not surprised on the CPU drop. Heck, I know of some places in the area still running esxi4...why? Some companies want to get their "full investment" out of the stack.
 
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Evan

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Not surprised on the CPU drop. Heck, I know of some places in the area still running esxi4...why? Some companies want to get their "full investment" out of the stack.
But over the years the saving in electricity consumption must have made it worth to migrate.
I am all for if it ain’t broke don’t fix it! But there is a limit where that makes sense.

E5 v1/v2 certianly is still a viable and capable and compared to prior generation power efficient performing platform and a lot of people will still be using them for a few more years but I can’t disagree about dropping support for older systems.

The complexity in these things comes of you stay too long on old stuff is the upgrade may not be possible or have to take more than 1 step complicating the change (costing $$ in manpower and downtime etc)

Anyway back to VMware topics I don’t have time right now but want to see it it’s actually that much faster, let’s hop so !
 

RyC

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Oct 17, 2013
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FYI: if you're trying to migrate the vCSA to 6.7 and its networking is on a dvSwitch, you may need to set the Security Policy to Accept MAC Address Changes or Forged Transmits or both (the default for both is Reject). Otherwise, the installer helpfully stalls out during Stage 2 with no error message other than "lost communication" (the installer even runs "pre-migration" checks and you would think it would tell you about this at that point).

This appears to be caused by the new vCSA attempting to change the MAC address to match the source vCSA MAC address to keep the source networking settings.
 

Rand__

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Mar 6, 2014
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When will it show up on VMUG?
Product Availability
VMware vSphere 6.7 and VMware vSAN 6.7 are both expected to become available by the end of VMware’s Q1 FY19 (May 4, 2018).

Not sooner than this, likely two to three months later;)

OT:
Note this o/c includes Spectre/Meltdown patches which have heavy impact on NVMe performance from what I have seen.
@gea - have you run through your Napp-IT testing with patched ESX boxes or 2017 patch level?
 

gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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No, i am very busy atm with Solaris 11.4 and OmniOS 151026 with ATTO HBA.
ESXi must wait.
 

marcoi

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Apr 6, 2013
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E5 v1/v2 Are to be dropped in the next version I read elsewhere.
that might kill a lot of people upgrading or moving forward with esxi at least for home or small business usage. I know if that would be the case, i might not upgrade past 6.7 for a while.
 

CreoleLakerFan

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Oct 29, 2013
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that might kill a lot of people upgrading or moving forward with esxi at least for home or small business usage. I know if that would be the case, i might not upgrade past 6.7 for a while.
Hell, I have four dual westmere's making up the bulk of my lab at home (one 2670v1 for my always on AIO). I won't even be upgrading to 6.7.
 

Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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E5 v1/v2 Are to be dropped in the next version I read elsewhere.
If that next version is soon that’s pretty aggressive, I mean v2’s are now 4 years or just over in age, the v3’s are less 4 years still, a not insignificant number of companies use 5 year lease and 5 years for lots of people in not an unreasonable lifetime. (Even if in an enterprise running ESX 3 or 4 years lifetime is preferred due to just the fact the next version can always run more VM’s)

I wonder what technology or instruction set they are considering essential for the next version onwards ?
 

Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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TSX-NI is v4 so won’t be that, I Guess it could be dropping support for AVX and needing AVX2 as a minimum but not sure where that leaves all the non full core Xeon’s, also dropped maybe...
 

ecosse

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Jul 2, 2013
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Out of interest, I assume not supported doesn't mean it won't work. Plenty of people here seem to run ES processors with no issues (but the inherent risk that there might be incompatibilities) so how big is the risk of sticking with a CPU that is no longer supported (from a pure home lab perspective that is)
 

RyC

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Oct 17, 2013
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I think we're worried about ESXi actually not working on those processors. If you try to install/upgrade to 6.7 on a Xeon 55XX/56XX processor for example, the installer will not let you proceed (and I think it won't even boot if you use an already upgraded flash drive). Official VMware support for nearly all of the Nehalem/Westmere systems ended a while ago I believe.

The 6.7 release notes do say:
The following CPUs are supported in the vSphere 6.7 release, but they may not be supported in future vSphere releases. Please plan accordingly:

  • Intel Xeon E3-1200 (SNB-DT)
  • Intel Xeon E7-2800/4800/8800 (WSM-EX)
I don't see this section in the 6.5 release notes about any of the processors they stopped supporting in 6.7, but IIRC as far back as 6.0, the ESXi installer was throwing a warning on my Dell C1100 that the processors were going to lose support "in a future release". I haven't been able to check yet if my S2600CP with an E5 v1 throws a warning like that.

I assume the Intel Xeon E3-1200 (SNB-DT) are the Sandy Bridge E3 v1's, so it looks like at least some Sandy Bridge processors are going to be cut off. I do hope the E5 Sandy and Ivy's get a few more years of support though.
 
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ecosse

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Jul 2, 2013
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I think we're worried about ESXi actually not working on those processors. If you try to install/upgrade to 6.7 on a Xeon 55XX/56XX processor for example, the installer will not let you proceed (and I think it won't even boot if you use an already upgraded flash drive). Official VMware support for nearly all of the Nehalem/Westmere systems ended a while ago I believe.

The 6.7 release notes do say:

I don't see this section in the 6.5 release notes about any of the processors they stopped supporting in 6.7, but IIRC as far back as 6.0, the ESXi installer was throwing a warning on my Dell C1100 that the processors were going to lose support "in a future release". I haven't been able to check yet if my S2600CP with an E5 v1 throws a warning like that.

I assume the Intel Xeon E3-1200 (SNB-DT) are the Sandy Bridge E3 v1's, so it looks like at least some Sandy Bridge processors are going to be cut off. I do hope the E5 Sandy and Ivy's get a few more years of support though.
Thank you for the long explanation, much appreciated. Interesting on the 56xx support, I was thinking of putting a couple of my old x8dtt nodes back into operation - this has given me second thoughts!
 

RyC

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Oct 17, 2013
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Take this with a grain of salt, but I'm seeing reports that Xeon Westmere 5600 processors may run 6.7 contrary to the release notes. Nehalem 5500 processors seem to not work at all though.

ESXi 6.5 will continue to be patched for a while too, so it's not the total end of the road for these old systems and ESXi
 

gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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I am just playing with the new 6.7
First impression is very good, very fast and stable.

What I found is that you can now add a raw physical disk to a VM from the Web-GUI. You only need an SAS HBA (Onboard Sata seems not yet supported). If you add an Sata disk, only its WWN is displayed when adding. SAS disks additionally show a product and size info. There is no need to pass-through the HBA. Smart detection is ok and you can move such a disk without problems to a barebone OmniOS setup and import a ZFS pool there.

This makes VMs more flexible as you can add disks to several VMs easily. For example in a lab environment with security concerns you can use a small storage VM for NFS only to have all ZFS datastore advantages and connect it with the ESXi vmkernel interface over a secure internal vswitch (without access from an external LAN) and add a second storage VM with two nics, one for regular SMB filer use in an unsecure LAN and the other for backups in the secure SAN network.
 

sentania

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Dec 4, 2016
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Take this with a grain of salt, but I'm seeing reports that Xeon Westmere 5600 processors may run 6.7 contrary to the release notes. Nehalem 5500 processors seem to not work at all though.

ESXi 6.5 will continue to be patched for a while too, so it's not the total end of the road for these old systems and ESXi
I can sort of confirm this. I was able to successfully install 6.7 on a nested VM running on X5675s.

Once I upgrade vCenter I'll give it a shot on a physical host.
 
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