ESXi 7, worth the upgrade?

[HendersonD]

We are running ESXi 6.7 and the decision to upgrade to 7.0 depends on several factors. We are running 50 VMs, 35 of them Windows 2019 and the rest various flavors of Linux. We also have a small VDI setup using Horizon to present 160 Windows 10 desktops that have GPUs via nVidia grid cards. In our situation, are there compelling reasons to upgrade to ESXi 7.0? Our hardware compliment of HPE DL380 Gen10s and Nimble Storage can be used with ESXi 7.

[scott28tt]

Seen the high-level of what was new?

Introducing vSphere 7: Features & Technology for the Hybrid Cloud - VMware vSphere Blog

[Alex_Romeo]

Hi,

the Dl380 Gen 10 is compatible with Esxi 7.0

VMware Compatibility Guide - System Search

If there are no malfunctions that warrant an update, I would avoid the update. Like all newly released products, it is not a good rule to put them in the production environment immediately. Wait at least for the exit of the U1.

ARomeo

[HendersonD]

I did see this article

• Not sure we will ever use Kubernetes but I may be wrong
• Improvements in DRS seem interesting
• We do have nVidia cards but even with the new assignable hardware feature I do not think that would change our current setup
• Our installation is fairly static, once in awhile we bring up a new VM and once in awhile we might retire a VM. The vSphere Lifecycle Manager seems to be aimed at larger installations that have more changes across time
• Improvements to vMotion are great if you have VMs that use a lot of CPU/RAM and are very busy like huge Oracle databases. vMotion in our situation works fine now. Better vMotion with VDI desktops that use nVidia grid would be nice, not sure the ESXi 7 improves anything in this area
• Two factor authentication would be nice to improve our security

I know there are a bunch of other improvements in ESXi 7. I guess what I am looking for are people who have made the jump and felt it was worth it

[HendersonD]

Yes good advice. If we do upgrade we will wait until the first major update is released