VMware vSphere 8 Essentials Retail and Branch Office product key

You can only deploy or upgrade to vCenter Server using an appliance. The vCenter Server appliance contains all the Platform Services Controller services from earlier releases, preserving all previous functionality, including authentication, certificate management, and licensing.

vSphere 8.0 introduces vSphere Distributed Services Engine that provides the ability to offload some of the infrastructure functions from a server CPU to a data processing unit (DPU). A DPU device features multiple embedded CPU cores, memory, and a trimmed version of an ESXi hypervisor that runs on the server. DPUs are pre-configured devices that you can use for network acceleration. You manage the life cycle of the software and firmware that runs on a DPU device by using vSphere Lifecycle Manager images workflows.

Use vSphere Lifecycle Manager as a centralized and simplified lifecycle management mechanism for VMware ESXi hosts. With vSphere Lifecycle Manager you can manage ESXi hosts by using images and baselines at the cluster level. You can also convert a cluster that uses baselines into a cluster that uses vSphere Lifecycle Manager images. In vSphere 8.0 you can start using vSphere Configuration Profiles to manage the configuration of the hosts in a cluster collectively. You first set up a desired configuration at the cluster level and then, in a single operation, you can apply the configuration to all hosts in the cluster.

Learn how to use vSphere with Tanzu to transform vSphere into a platform for running Kubernetes workloads natively on the hypervisor layer. With this functionality, you can enable a vSphere cluster to run Kubernetes workloads by configuring it then as a Supervisor. DevOps engineers and application developers can then run containerized applications on vSphere Namespaces by deploying vSphere Pod, VMs, and upstream Kubernetes clusters through Tanzu Kubernetes Grid with vSphere. You can deploy a Supervisor on vSphere Zones to provide high-availability to your workloads at cluster level as one vSphere Zone maps to one vSphere cluster. Workloads that you run on a Supervisor deployed on zones are distributed on the vSphere clusters that are part of the zones and are protected against cluster-level failure. To keep your vSphere with Tanzu environment up to date, backup and restore, and troubleshoot, learn how to maintain vSphere with Tanzu.

You can view available vCenter Server updates and upgrades and produce interoperability reports about VMware products associated with vCenter Server using Update Planner. You can also generate pre-update reports that let you make sure your system meets the minimum software and hardware requirements for a successful upgrade of vCenter Server. The report provides information about problems that might prevent the completion of a software upgrade, and actions you can take to remedy those problems.

You can use centralized license management to manage licenses for ESXi hosts, vCenter Server, vSAN clusters, and other VMware solutions. Learn how to use the VMware vSphere Client to manage licenses in your vCenter Server environment.

Learn how to configure networking for vSphere, including how to create vSphere distributed switches and vSphere standard switches, monitor networks to analyze the traffic between virtual machines (VMs) and hosts, and manage network resources. vSphere networking is one of the most critical components in your environment, as it is how your ESXi hosts and VMs communicate.

You can learn about vSphere storage to help you plan a storage strategy for your virtual data center. You can also learn how to configure and use the virtualized and software-defined storage technologies that ESXi and vCenter Server provide. vSphere supports several storage technologies for both traditional and software-defined storage environments.

Learn how to secure your environment using vSphere security features and best practices to safeguard your environment from attack. vSphere provides comprehensive, built-in security, delivering secure applications, infrastructure, data, and access.

You can provide business continuity using vCenter High Availability (vCenter HA) and vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT). vCenter HA provides failover protection against hardware and operating system outages within your virtualized IT environment. If there is a host failure, Fault Tolerance provides continuous protection for a VM.

You can use resource pools, clusters, vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), vSphere Distributed Power Management (DPM), and vSphere Storage I/O Control to manage and allocate resources for ESXi hosts and vCenter Server.