Recently VMware announced vSphere 6.7 U3 with some cool new features and enhancements which talks about driver updates and also focuses on vGPU enhancements which helps accelerate machine learning tasks.
NVIDIA virtual GPU (vGPU) enhancements:
NVIDIA Virtual GPU (vGPU) enables multiple virtual machines to have simultaneous, direct access to a single physical GPU, using the same NVIDIA graphics drivers. NVIDIA vGPU provides VMs with unparalleled graphics performance, compute performance, and application compatibility, with the cost-effectiveness and scalability by sharing a GPU among multiple workloads.
By using the NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology with vSphere, we can dedicate one full GPU device to a single Virtual Machine, or we can also share a GPU device across multiple VMs, using vGPU profiles.
VMware announced vSphere 6.7 which enhanced the support and capabilities for GPUs by virtualizing Nvidia GPUs also for non-VDI and non-general-purpose-computing use cases like artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data and more.
With enhancements to Nvidia GRID vGPU technology in vSphere 6.7, instead of having to power off workloads running on GPUs, we can simply suspend and resume those VMs, allowing better lifecycle management of the underlying host and significantly reducing the disruption of service for end-users.
VMware and Nvidia continues to invest in this area, with the goal of bringing the full vSphere experience to GPUs and now with vSphere 6.7 Update 3, we can configure virtual machines and templates with up to four vGPU devices which cover the use cases that require multiple GPU attached to a virtual machine.
To use the vMotion vGPU feature, we need to set the vgpu.hotmigrate.enabled advanced setting to true and make sure that both your vCenter Server and ESXi hosts are running vSphere 6.7 Update 3.
Driver enhancements:
ESXi 6.7 Update 3 adds guest encapsulation offload and UDP, and ESP RSS support to the Enhanced Networking Stack (ENS). Checksum calculations are offloaded from encapsulated packets to the virtual device emulation and you can run RSS on UDP and ESP packets on demand. UDP RSS supports both IPv4 and IPv6, while ESP RSS supports only IPv4. The feature requires a VMXNET3 v4 driver.
bnxtnet driver enhancements: ESXi 6.7 Update 3 adds support for Broadcom 100G Network Adapters and multi-RSS feed to the bnxtnet driver.
Ability to change vCenter Server Primary Network Identifier:
When vCenter Servers for Windows are upgraded and migrated to the VCSA the migration process preserves the FQDN of the older Windows Server and we struggle with the requirement of updating FQDN and hostnames for the new vCenter Server.
With vSphere 6.7 Update 3, we can now update the vCenter FQDN or Primary Network IDentifier of vCenter Server also known as the system name which is set during installation when deploying vCenter Server, changing the PNID post-installation, was not possible until this release.
Note:Changing the FQDN is only supported for embedded vCenter Server nodes and Products which are registered with vCenter Server will first need to be unregistered prior to an FQDN change. Once the FQDN change is complete they can then be reregistered back again
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