VMware released vSphere 7.0 on April 2th, and following the commitment that Dell Technologies has to support on VxRail a new version of vSphere within 30 days of VMware GA… today, April 28th we have RTW (Released to Web) VxRail 7.0.
As you can see, finally marketing decided to sync the naming of VxRail software with the version of vSphere it supports. I think this will make it more easier for the user to understand.
The main purpose of this release (VxRail 7.0.000) was to have support for vSphere 7.0.0a. That being said, it still comes with the new functionality of supporting NSX-T with dual-port NIC. This new functionality uses the new vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) 7.0, that now comes with support for NSX-T Distributed Port Groups. This means that now you can use a single VDS for both NSX-T 3.0 and vSphere 7 networking, so the VDS managed by the VxRail Manager can be used for this. If you want to read more about this vSphere functionality, you can do it from this blog: https://rutgerblom.com/2020/04/08/nsx-t-3-0-meets-vsphere-7-vds-7-0/
If you want to install this new version, you need to know that it will not be yet available from the VxRail Manager for automatic download/install. You need to go to http://www.dell.com/support, and download the release package to do a local upgrade. This was done this way to make sure the customer wants to upgrade at this point, as many of them usually wait until at least the first vSphere Update version is released before moving it to production.
Another consideration is that due to COVID-19, there were some delays with the Broadcom NICs (we where able to include the Broadcom drivers, thanks for the correction Jeremy Merrill) and Nvidia GPU, so for this version we don’t have updated drivers. This means that a customer with these components should wait until next code is out, as it will come with these drivers.
VxRail will also support VCF 4.0, I will be writing about that in another post when it is released.
Excellent my Friend