vSphere 6.7 has officially GA'ed! Below is an aggregation of all the related release notes and downloads for this vSphere release. I have also created a short URL which you can use to access this exact same page using vmwa.re/vsphere67
Note: Not all links are live yet, but they should be available later this morning. Please be patient and in the meantime, you can check out all the vSphere 6.7 collateral which has been published and can be accessed here.
vSphere 6.7
VMware has just released a new web-based tool that will enable customers to easily view and compare product configuration maximums across different VMware product versions. You can access the easy to remember URL by going to: https://configmax.vmware.com
In this first release of this tool, customers will have the ability to look up configuration maximums for vSphere (includes VSAN) which will initially support vSphere 6.0, vSphere 6.5, vSphere 6.5 Update 1 & the recently released vSphere 6.7 as well as comparing across versions. To view the existing vSphere configuration maximum, simply click on the "Get Started" button.
As you can see from the screenshot below, you now have a single place where you can view the vSphere configuration maximums across different versions. Once you have selected the target version, you can either view all maximums or you can selectively choose the sections you are interested in.
The other really neat feature is the ability to compare the configuration maximums across different vSphere versions. This is really useful for customers to be able to quickly tell what improvements and enhancements have been made, especially as customers plan for vSphere upgrades. To begin, simply click on the "Compare Limits" button at the top. Next, select the target vSphere version and then you can add one or more versions to compare against.
Once you click on the Compare button, a new window will popup providing you the comparison between the target and selected vSphere versions. You can quickly see how the maximums have changed across these vSphere versions. You can even export the results to Excel by click on export option on the upper right hand corner and you be prompted to save a CSV file.
I can tell you, this definitely beats having to manually Google for the correct vSphere configuration maximum document since I can never remember the long URL to the static PDF documents! I am excited to see the improved user experience when consuming our product maximums and I know the team will be working on adding more products and features in the future. Definitely keep an eye on this site and also be sure to update your bookmarks. If you have any feedback or things you would like to see, feel free to leave a comment and I will make sure it reaches the Product and Development teams.
In todays data centers, it is not uncommon to find servers with only 2 x 10GbE network interfaces, this is especially true with the rise of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure over the last several years. For customers looking to deploy NSX-T with ESXi, there is an important physical network constraint to be aware of which is quickly mentioned in the NSX-T documentation here.
For example, your hypervisor host has two physical links that are up: vmnic0 and vmnic1. Suppose vmnic0 is used for management and storage networks, while vmnic1 is unused. This would mean that vmnic1 can be used as an NSX-T uplink, but vmnic0 cannot. To do link teaming, you must have two unused physical links available, such as vmnic1 and vmnic2.
As shown in the diagram below, an ESXi host with only two physical NICs can not provide complete network redundancy as each pNIC can only be associated with a single switch (VSS/VDS or the new N-VDS) as pNICs can not be shared across switches.
For customers, this means that you need to allocate a minimum of 4 pNICs to provide redundancy for both overlay traffic and non-overlay VMkernel traffic such as Management, vMotion, VSAN, etc. This is much easier said than done as not all hardware platforms can easily be expanded and even if they can, there still is a huge cost in expanding the physical network footprint (switch port, cabling, etc).
UPDATE (06/12/18) - As of NSX-T 2.2, which was recently released, there is now a UI in NSX-T Manager for managing the migration of VMkernel interfaces to the N-VDS. For automation purposes, you may still find this article useful but now you have option of using the UI.