It’s always an exciting time at VMware when a new NSX build goes ‘GA’. Yesterday (July 6th) marks the official release of NSX-V 6.2.8.
NSX 6.2.8 is a maintenance or patch release focused mainly on bug fixes, and there are quite a few in this one. You can head over to the release notes for the full list, but I’ll provide a few highlights below.
Before I do that, here are the relevant links:
- VMware NSX for vSphere 6.2.8 Release Notes
- NSX 6.2.x Documentation (select 6.2 from the release dropdown)
- VMware NSX for vSphere 6.2.8 Download
In my opinion, some of the most important fixes in 6.2.8 include the following:
Fixed Issue 1760940: NSX Manager High CPU triggered by many simultaneous vMotion tasks
This was a fairly common issue that we would see in larger deployments with large numbers of dynamic security groups. The most common workflow that would trigger this would be putting a host into maintenance mode, triggering a large number of simultaneous vMotions. I’m happy to see that this one was finally fixed. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that this has yet been corrected in any of the 6.3.x releases, but I’m sure it will come. You can find more information in VMware KB 2150668.
Fixed Issue 1854519: VMs lose North to south connectivity after migration from a VLAN to a bridged VXLAN
This next one is not quite so common, but I’ve personally seen a couple of customers hit this. If you have a VM in a VLAN network, and then move it to the VXLAN dvPortgroup associated with the bridge, connectivity is lost. This happens because a RARP doesn’t get sent to update the physical switch’s MAC table (VMware often uses RARP instead of GARP for this purpose). Most customers would use the VLAN backed half of the bridged network for physical devices, and not for VMs, but there is no reason why this shouldn’t work.
Fixed Issue 1849037: NSX Manager API threads get exhausted when communication link with NSX Edge is broken
I think this one is pretty self explanatory – if the manager can’t process API calls, a lot of the manager’s functionality is lost. There are a number of reasons an ESXi host could lose its communication channel to the NSX manager, so definitely a good fix.
Fixed Issue 1813363: Multiple IP addresses on same vNIC causes delays in firewall publish operation
Another good fix that should help to reduce NSX manager CPU utilization and improve scale. Multiple IPs on vNICs is fairly common to see.
Fixed Issue 1798537: DFW controller process on ESXi (vsfwd) may run out of memory
I’ve seen this issue a few times in very large micro segmentation environments, and very happy to see it fixed. This should certainly help improve stability and environment scale.
vswitchzero 