VMware will be sunsetting the NSX native load balancers. Customers should be migrating to the currently supported NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Avi) which simplifies operations today while getting you ready for your multi-cloud and container strategies tomorrow. Avi works across all environments beyond the NSX framework, expanding use cases to public cloud, containers and app security while adding capabilities for GSLB, WAF and analytics. A migration tool will be available to make the migration of your existing configuration to the current technology easy and painless.
The discontinuation of support for SD cards and USB boot media put many customers in the uncomfortable position of having to replace their boot media on existing servers. VMware has responded by resuming support for SD cards and USB media under certain criteria.
The problem with these media remains. The wear of these storages was worked around by swapping out write-intensive areas. Since update 7.0 U3c, the setup detects an installation on SD/USB devices and tries to swap critical areas of the OSData partition to more stable media. This for instance includes VM-Tools and Scratch. Starting with the upcoming vSphere.Next release, the entire OSData partition will be swapped out to more robust data storage. However, the question arises here why, when resilient storage media is available, it is not used completely as a boot device right away.
VMware has published details about the changed strategy concerning boot media in KB 85685.
VMware has updated the application process for the vExpert program. The application is now possible all year round. Only during the selection process the portal will be closed for about 2 weeks. This is usually in February for the first half of the year and in the July/August area for the second half of the year.
Added Network Security Policy support for VMs deployed via VM operator service – Security Policies on NSX-T can be created via Security Groups based on Tags. It is now possible to create NSX-T based security policy and apply it to VMs deployed through VM operator based on NSX-T tags.
Supervisor Clusters Support Kubernetes 1.22 – This release adds the support of Kubernetes 1.22 and drops the support for Kubernetes 1.19. The supported versions of Kubernetes in this release are 1.22, 1.21, and 1.20. Supervisor Clusters running on Kubernetes version 1.19 will be auto-upgraded to version 1.20 to ensure that all your Supervisor Clusters are running on the supported versions of Kubernetes.
Check before update
If you upgraded vCenter Server from a version prior to 7.0 Update 3c and your Supervisor Cluster is on Kubernetes 1.9.x, the tkg-controller-manager pods go into a CrashLoopBackOff state, rendering the guest clusters unmanageable
The image above indicates we’re already on version 1.21, which is good for an update.
Update
Before updating your VCSA make sure you have a configuration backup! An optional VM snapshot is a good idea too. It might help to revert settings fast in case something goes wrong.
You can either apply the update from VAMI or from the shell. The image below shows an overview of the new packages with this update.
After the update is installed you will have an option to deploy a new Kubernetes version in your Supervisor Control Plane.
