Home > Servers > Rack and Tower Servers > Intel > White Papers > Upgrade to Dell EMC PowerEdge R940 servers with VMware vSphere 7.0 and gain greater OLTP performance > How the latest VMware vSphere 7.0 features could scale with your Dell EMC environment
We focused on single-node database virtualization in our testing, but many virtualized environments rely on multiple nodes for additional performance, capacity, and data protection. VMware vSphere 7.0 provides new features that further support both small and large virtualized environments, while Dell EMC offers integrations for environments comprised of Dell EMC PowerEdge hardware. Below are some of the new features in vSphere 7.0 that could help support and grow a virtualized database environment on the Dell EMC PowerEdge R940 platform. We did not test these features, and gathered the following information from publicly available sources.
New vLCM features, like cluster-level hardware compatibility checks and desired state image compliance, help manage hypervisor updates across large cluster deployments, while Dell EMC integrations like OMIVV improve vLCM by adding firmware management across your PowerEdge environment.6
DRS now monitors VM usage and moves heavily utilized VMs to a host with a high VM DRS score to ensure better performance for that VM and fewer performance hits for its neighbors. This feature can increase performance across the cluster by avoiding resource contention among individual VMs.7
With this feature, organizations can quickly spin up multiple VMs based on a single template. In our testing, we used a SQL database VM; in a larger server environment, we could create a template based on that VM and use it to generate multiple VMs.8
In addition to these features, Dell EMC offers the following VMware vSphere integrations, which can help organizations support Dell EMC PowerEdge environments of varying sizes.
With this tool, admins can monitor Dell EMC PowerEdge hardware inventory, view hardware system alerts, manage firmware with vSphere Lifecycle Manager, create cluster configuration and firmware profiles for cluster updates, and streamline deployment of ESXi™ to PowerEdge servers, all from the vCenter UI. Whether your environment has one Dell EMC server or many, OMIVV helps simplify management of ESXi updates and firmware.9
vLCM can use incremental software updates, released by Dell EMC in between major releases, in conjunction with the ESXi base image to create an updated custom Dell EMC image.10
6 Dell Technologies, “VMware vSphere Life Cycle Manager (vLCM) and Dell EMC integration,” accessed October 28, 2020, https://downloads.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_software_int/esuprt_software_virtualization_solutions/vm- ware-esxi-7x_white-papers3_en-us.pdf.
7 Adam Eckerle, “Introducing vSphere 7: Features & Technology for the Hybrid Cloud,” accessed November 13, 2020, https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2020/03/vsphere-7-features.html.
8 Nigel Hickey, “vSphere 7 – Content Library,” accessed October 30, 2020, https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2020/04/vsphere-7-content-library.html.
9 Dell Technologies, “OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter,” accessed October 28, 2020, https://www.dell.com/support/article/en-us/sln311238/openmanage-integration-for-vmware-vcenter?lang=en.
10 Dell Technologies, “VMware vSphere Life Cycle Manager (vLCM) and Dell EMC integration,” accessed October 28, 2020, https://downloads.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_software_int/esuprt_software_virtualization_solutions/vm- ware-esxi-7x_white-papers3_en-us.pdf.