vSphere 8 Hardware Requirements | Must Know Before Install

Introducing the new vSphere 8

As VMware announced the End of General Support for vSphere 6.5 and 6.7, you may need to upgrade your infrastructure to new versions of vSphere that are still supported as soon as possible. Optionally, you can upgrade ESXi from 6.7 to 7.0, or directly upgrade to ESXi 8, the latest release of vSphere.

Tip: VMware product lifecycle phase
General Support Phase: VMware offers maintenance updates and upgrades, bug and security fixes, and technical assistance as per the Support and Subscription Terms and Conditions.
Technical Guidance Phase: VMware doesn’t offer new hardware support, server/client/guest OS updates, security patches or bug fixes unless otherwise noted. Customers are encouraged to use the Self-Help portal as priority.
End of Support Life (EOSL): A product has reached its end of support life when it is no longer generally supported by VMware.
End of Availability (EOA)/ End of Distribution (EOD): A product has reached its end of distribution when VMware can no longer make it available as a download from vmware.com or distribute the product in other ways.

The new vSphere 8 allows you to run more and more powerful virtual machines, and perform tasks faster. Before you initiate an upgrade to vSphere 8, you need to check the ESXi hardware requirements, compatibility, and backup your environments in advance.

Next, this article will share you with the vSphere 8 hardware requirements to help you be well prepared for the upgrade.

vSphere 8 hardware requirements

When planning your vSphere 8 deployment, it’s important to ensure that your hardware meets the minimum requirements for CPU, RAM, storage, and network.

Here are some official ESXi 8 minimum hardware requirements provided by VMware.

✓  Supported server platform.

✓  A host with at least two CPU cores.

✓  Multi-core of 64-bit x86 processors.

✓  The NX/XD bit to be enabled for the CPU in the BIOS.

✓  A minimum of 8 GB of physical RAM. Provide at least 12 GB of RAM to run virtual machines in typical production environments.

✓  To support 64-bit virtual machines, support for hardware virtualization (Intel VT-x or AMD RVI) must be enabled on x64 CPUs.

✓  One or more Gigabit or faster Ethernet controllers.

✓  A boot disk of at least 32 GB of persistent storage such as HDD, SSD, or NVMe. A boot device must not be shared between ESXi hosts.

✓  SCSI disk or a local, non-network, RAID LUN with unpartitioned space for the virtual machines.

✓  For Serial ATA (SATA), a disk connected through supported SAS controllers or supported on-board SATA controllers. SATA disks are considered remote, not local. These disks are not used as a scratch partition by default because they are seen as remote.

Note:
1. For a complete list of supported server platforms, processors, and network adapter models, see the official VMware Compatibility Guide.
2. You cannot connect a SATA CD-ROM device to a virtual machine on an ESXi host. To use the SATA CD-ROM device, you must use IDE emulation mode.

A reliable and efficient vSphere 8 backup solution

You may need an effective backup software for VMware vSphere to protect your virtual environment and gain the ability to quickly recover your virtual machines when needed. In this article, I will introduce an efficient vSphere backup software - AOMEI Cyber Backup, which enables you to backup multiple VMs either managed by vCenter Server, or on a standalone ESXi host.

It simplifies the backup process and present the steps with intuitive GUI interface. In addition, it offers you the following benefits.

✦ Agentless Backup: create complete and independent image-level backup for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V VMs.
✦ Flexible vSphere Backup: batch backup large numbers of VMs managed by vCenter Server, or multiple VMs on a standalone ESXi host.
✦ Multiple Storage Destinations: backup to local drive, or network destinations like Windows share or NAS.
✦ Automated Execution: create backup schedules to automate backups daily, weekly, monthly.
✦ Role Assignment: allows one administrator to create sub-accounts with limited privileges.

AOMEI Cyber Backup supports both paid and free versions of VMware ESXi 6.0 and later versions. Next, I will show you how to perform vSphere VM backup and restore via AOMEI Cyber Backup. You can click the following button to download the free trial.

*You can choose to install this VM backup software on either Windows or Linux system.

Steps to perform vSphere backup and restore via AOMEI Cyber Backup

▶ Backup multiple VMs:

1. Bind Devices: Access to AOMEI Cyber Backup web client, navigate to Source Device > VMware > + Add VMware Device to Add vCenter or Standalone ESXi host. And then click … > Bind Device.

2. Create Backup Task: Navigate to Backup Task > + Create New Task, and select VMware ESXi Backup as the Backup Type.

3. Set the Task Name, Device, Target, Schedule and Cleanup as needed.

• Task Name: you can change the task name or use the default name with an ordinal.
• Device: batch backup multiple VMs on vCenter or standalone host within one backup task.

• Target: select to back up to a local path, or to a network path like NAS.
• Schedule (optional): perform full, differential, or incremental backup, and automate execution according to the frequency you specified.

• Cleanup (optional): automatically delete the old backup copies that exceed the retention period you specified.

4. Run Backup: Now you can click Start Backup and select Add the schedule and start backup now, or Add the schedule only.

Created backup tasks will be listed and monitored separately for restoring, progress checking and schedule changing.

By selecting Restore to new location option, you can create a new VM in the same or another datastore/host directly from the backup to perform out-of-spacre recovery, saves the trouble of re-configuring the new VM.

Summary

vSphere 8 is the latest version of VMware’s popular virtualization platform, and it comes with a range of new features and enhancements. Whether you are upgrading from an earlier version of vSphere or starting fresh, it is important to ensure that your hardware meets the ESXi hardware requirements, including CPU, RAM, storage, and network.

By meeting these requirements, you will be able to take advantage of vSphere 8 features and capabilities, and ensure that your virtualization environment runs smoothly and efficiently. This article listed some vSphere 8 hardware requirements for reference.