In this blogpost I will as a VMware vExpert cover whats new in VMware vSphere 9
VMware vSphere 9 was released, June 17 2025 as part of VMware vSphere Foundation 9 and VMware Cloud Foundation 9
Build number: 24957454
Components of VMware vSphere 9
VMware vSphere ESXi9
VMware vCenter 9
Versions of VMware vSphere 9
VMware vSphere Foundation 9
VMware Cloud Foundation 9
Upgrade path for VMware vSphere 9
Streamlined Upgrade Path: vSphere 9.0 supports direct upgrades from vSphere 8.0, enabling smoother transitions for recent versions. Compatibility Requirements: vCenter 9.0 requires ESX 8.0 or later, dropping support for ESX 7.0 and earlier versions. Lifecycle Management Shift: Traditional VMware Update Manager is replaced by image-based lifecycle management for all clusters and hosts.
Key New Features in vSphere 9.0
1. Memory Tiering over NVMe vSphere 9 introduces NVMe Memory Tiering, allowing local NVMe devices to serve as a secondary memory tier. This can expand effective host memory capacity and improve VM density without requiring more DRAM.
2. Virtual Hardware Version 22
Updated VM hardware version that enables support for up to 960 vCPUs and larger memory limits (e.g., ~16 TB).
Improved device support (NVMe, PCI passthrough, graphics). This unlocks greater performance and scalability for heavy workloads.
3. Enhanced Storage Support
Native support for 4K SSDs on compatible hardware.
Write Zeroes support and namespace write protection for virtual NVMe devices, which improve performance and storage efficiency.
4. Lifecycle Management Upgrades
vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) enhancements, including mixed-hardware clusters and composite cluster images.
Traditional baselines-based patching is replaced by image-based lifecycle workflows.
5. vMotion & Cluster Improvements
Optimizations for vMotion (including better performance for GPU-enabled workloads).
Improvements to managing clusters and lifecycle across hosts.
6. Kubernetes & Modern Workloads Support
Enhanced support and tooling for integrating Kubernetes workloads via Supervisor services (especially in vSphere Foundation / Cloud Foundation contexts).
Live VM customization APIs and enhanced automation.
7. API & Developer Experience Enhancements
Open API 3.0 and a more unified SDK for automation across vCenter, vSAN, and core APIs.
Simplified automation and scripting using consistent API sets.
8. Security & Compliance Improvements
Enhanced support for modern security standards including TLS 1.3 and vTPM support.
Namespace write protection and disk protections for virtual storage.
9. Changes in Deprecated/Removed Features vSphere 9 also marks the deprecation or removal of certain legacy features such as Auto Deploy, Host Profiles, baselines (in favor of vLCM), and parts of older management tooling — signaling VMware’s shift toward more modern infrastructure management.
Apple Vision Pro was released 2nd February 2024 in United States. I was lucky to get my hands on a device and shoot some videos of user experience with End User Computing (EUC) using Frame, Windows 365, Citrix and Parallels. I did a presentation 15th February 2024 at Teamrge about what the Apple Vision Pro is and how the user experience is with above EUC technologies. I will in this blogpost cover what Apple Vision Pro is and show user the user experience with videos I have uploaded to my Youtube channel.
“Just as the Mac introduced us to personal computing, and iPhone introduced us to mobile computing, Apple Vision Pro introduces us to spatial computing.” –Tim Cook
Unlocking the power of the Apple Vision Pro – A comprehensive DaaS Exploration
I will in this blogpost cover each technology how Frame, Windows 365, Citrix and Parallels are working on the Apple Vision Pro
End user experience with Dizzion Frame
Frame is one of EUC technologies I have been followed since it was born back in the days when it was called main.frame. Frame was born independent and then sold to Nutanix and later to Dizzion, but this only means it keeps getting better and better, and I was very excited that Ruben Sprujit provided me access to their demo environment that is running in US East, US West and Europe. I could quickly access pre installed DaaS environments that have CAD applications, high end benchmark applications running and the best part have a GPU attached (NVIDIA A10) running from Microsoft Azure.
Frame is a solution that works great on any device, it works flawless out of the box on Apple iPad and Apple MacBook Air as I showed in below picture. This was taken from my hotel room when I was working while I was attending a conference. It gives an indication on how would user experience be if you had to work on a Frame DaaS environment running in US West *Revit (left on the Apple iPad) and (right on Apple MacBook Air M2) which is connected to Frame DaaS environment running in Europe *Google Earth.
Now you understand how Frame looks like from a typical “physical endpoint” let’s look at how it is working from Apple Vision Pro.
End user experience with Dizzion Frame and Apple Vision Pro
The simple things was with the Apple Vision Pro, I just started up the browser Safari and Frame works out of the box, I could easy login to multiple DaaS environments in US East, US West and Europe having 3 windows. Normal I work daily on my Apple MacBook Air 15″ M2 and it have a great screen but its still limited with resolution that’s the beauty with Apple Vision Pro. I could connect to my Apple MacBook Air 15″ M2 and then screen goes black on the “Apple MacBook Air” and then the display is floating in my face on the Apple Vision Pro “securely” as nobody beside myself can now see my screen from the Apple MacBook Air. That means I could now grab the window and easy extend it from 30″ to 400″ and resolution is crystal sharp and you can continue working, the difference between other XR headset is that I have never experience so sharp graphics and immersive user experience. I wanted to have multiple screen connected to my other Frame DaaS environments so I opened Safari on left side and connected to US West and on the right side I opened Safari and connected to Frame DaaS environment and opened Europe and now I am connecting to 3 locations in the world and have 3″ large floating monitors.
NVIDIA have released virtual GPU (vGPU) software 17. This is a production release and EOL Feb 2025.
Customers can now use vGPU with different amounts of frame buffer on same physical GPU. Example if you have a NVIDIA A40 you can use 2Q, 4Q, 8Q profiles on the same physical GPU.
NOTE: If you are customer using Microsoft Windows Server 2019 and have extended support from Microsoft and you can’t upgrade to Windows Server 2022, I advice you stay on NVIDIA 16.x release as this is supported until July 2026. After that you are forced to upgrade your operating system as NVIDIA will no longer support Windows Server 2019 with NVIDIA vGPU 16.x after July 2026. If you would like to use NVIDIA vGPU 17 with Windows Server 2019, this is not supported.
Distribution of a release of the Virtual GPU Manager and the NVIDIA vGPU software graphics driver for Linux that is based on NVIDIA Linux open GPU kernel modules
Support for vGPUs with different amounts of frame buffer on the same physical GPU
Support in the NVML API and the nvidia-smi command for getting information about vGPUs with different amounts of frame buffer on the same physical GPU
An option to configure guest VMs or physical hosts to acquire NVIDIA vGPU software licenses when a user logs in instead of at boot time
Support for GPU-P on GPUs that are based on the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace GPU architecture on Microsoft Azure Stack HCI
What’s new in vGPU software 17
Newly supported graphics cards:
NVIDIA RTX 5880 Ada
Newly supported hypervisor software:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux with KVM 9.3
Newly supported guest OSes:
Microsoft Windows 11 23H2
Microsoft Windows Server 2022 on Ubuntu
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0-9.2 on Microsoft Azure Stack HCI
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.3
Ubuntu 22.04 on Microsoft Azure Stack HCI
Newly supported remoting solutions:
VMware Horizon 2312 (8.12)
Feature Support Withdrawn in Release 17.0
Graphics cards no longer supported:
Tesla M6
Tesla M60
Tesla P4
Tesla P6
Tesla P40
Tesla P100 PCIe 12 GB
Tesla P100 PCIe 16 GB
Tesla P100 SXM2 16 GB
Hypervisor software no longer supported:
Red Hat Virtualization (RHV)
Windows Server 2019
Guest OSes no longer supported:
Windows Server 2019
Supported NVIDIA GPUs with NVIDIA vGPU Software 17
If you are using NVIDIA vGPU software with CUDA on Linux, avoid conflicting installation methods by installing CUDA from a distribution-independent runfile package. Do not install CUDA from a distribution-specific RPM or Deb package.
To ensure that the NVIDIA vGPU software graphics driver is not overwritten when CUDA is installed, deselect the CUDA driver when selecting the CUDA components to install.
OpenCL and CUDA applications are supported on the following NVIDIA vGPU types:
The 8Q vGPU type on the Tesla M10 GPU
All Q-series vGPU types on the following GPUs:
NVIDIA L2
NVIDIA L4
NVIDIA L20
NVIDIA L40
NVIDIA L40S
NVIDIA RTX 5000 Ada
NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada
NVIDIA A2
NVIDIA A10
NVIDIA A16
NVIDIA A40
NVIDIA RTX A5000
NVIDIA RTX A5500
NVIDIA RTX A6000
Tesla V100 SXM2
Tesla V100 SXM2 32GB
Tesla V100 PCIe
Tesla V100 PCIe 32GB
Tesla V100S PCIe 32GB
Tesla V100 FHHL
Tesla T4
Quadro RTX 6000
Quadro RTX 6000 passive
Quadro RTX 8000
Quadro RTX 8000 passive
NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit Development Tool Support
NVIDIA vGPU supports the following NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit development tools on some GPUs:
Debuggers:
CUDA-GDB
Compute Sanitizer
Profilers:
The Activity, Callback, and Profiling APIs of the CUDA Profiling Tools Interface (CUPTI)Other CUPTI APIs, such as the Event and Metric APIs, are not supported.
NVIDIA Nsight™ Compute
NVIDIA Nsight Systems
NVIDIA Nsight plugin
NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio plugin
Other CUDA profilers, such as nvprof and NVIDIA Visual Profiler, are not supported.
These tools are supported only in Linux guest VMs.
NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit profilers are supported and can be enabled on a VM for which unified memory is enabled.
Note:By default, NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit development tools are disabled on NVIDIA vGPU. If used, you must enable NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit development tools individually for each VM that requires them by setting vGPU plugin parameters. For instructions, see Enabling NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit Development Tools for NVIDIA vGPU.
The following table lists the GPUs on which NVIDIA vGPU supports these debuggers and profilers.
GPU
vGPU Mode
Debuggers
Profilers
NVIDIA L2
Time-sliced
✓
✓
NVIDIA L4
Time-sliced
✓
✓
NVIDIA L20
Time-sliced
✓
✓
NVIDIA L40
Time-sliced
✓
✓
NVIDIA L40S
Time-sliced
✓
✓
NVIDIA RTX 5000 Ada
Time-sliced
✓
✓
NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada
Time-sliced
✓
✓
NVIDIA A2
Time-sliced
✓
✓
NVIDIA A10
Time-sliced
✓
✓
NVIDIA A16
Time-sliced
✓
✓
NVIDIA A40
Time-sliced
✓
✓
NVIDIA RTX A5000
Time-sliced
✓
✓
NVIDIA RTX A5500
Time-sliced
✓
✓
NVIDIA RTX A6000
Time-sliced
✓
✓
Tesla T4
Time-sliced
✓
✓
Quadro RTX 6000
Time-sliced
✓
✓
Quadro RTX 6000 passive
Time-sliced
✓
✓
Quadro RTX 8000
Time-sliced
✓
✓
Quadro RTX 8000 passive
Time-sliced
✓
✓
Tesla V100 SXM2
Time-sliced
✓
✓
Tesla V100 SXM2 32GB
Time-sliced
✓
✓
Tesla V100 PCIe
Time-sliced
✓
✓
Tesla V100 PCIe 32GB
Time-sliced
✓
✓
Tesla V100S PCIe 32GB
Time-sliced
✓
✓
Tesla V100 FHHL
Time-sliced
✓
✓
✓ Feature is supported
– Feature is not supported
Supported Hypervisors with NVIDIA vGPU 17
Citrix XenServer 8.0
Citrix Hypervisor 8.2
VMware vSphere 7.0 U2 or newer, 8.0 or newer
Microsoft Azure Stack HCI 22H2
Microsoft Server 2022 with Hyper-V role
Red Hat Enterprise Linux with KVM 7.9, 8.6, 8.9, 9.0,9.2,9.3
Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) 4.2, 4.3, 4.4
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, 22.04 LTS
Linux for KVM (H3C CAS, Huawei FusionSphere, Inspur InCloud Sphere, Nutanix AHV, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Sangfor aDesk, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server)
Supported Cloud Services for vGPU 17
NVIDIA virtual GPU software is supported on several cloud services with bring your own license (BYOL) licensing and licensing provided by the cloud service. Read more here:
Alibaba Cloud
Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS EC2)
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Microsoft Azure
Alibaba Cloud
NVIDIA vGPU and GPU pass through are supported on Alibaba Cloud.
NVIDIA vGPU Support
GPU
Supported Alibaba Cloud ECS Instances
Supported Guest Operating Systems
NVIDIA Licensing
Tesla P4
ecs.vgn5i-m1.large
ecs.vgn5i-m2.xlarge
ecs.vgn5i-m4.2xlarge
ecs.vgn5i-m8.4xlarge
Microsoft Windows Server 2019
Microsoft Windows Server 2016 1607, 1709
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
CentOS 7.x (64-bit)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 (64-bit)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP4/12 SP2 (64-bit)
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (64-bit)
BYOL
Tesla T4
ecs.vgn6i-m4.xlarge
ecs.vgn6i-m8.2xlarge
GPU Pass Through Support
GPU
Supported Alibaba Cloud ECS Instances
Supported Guest Operating Systems
NVIDIA Licensing
Tesla P4
ecs.gn5i-c2g1.large
ecs.gn5i-c4g1.xlarge
ecs.gn5i-c8g1.2xlarge
ecs.gn5i-c16g1.4xlarge
ecs.gn5i-c16g1.8xlarge
ecs.gn5i-c28g1.14xlarge
Windows Server 2019
Windows Server 2016 1607, 1709
Windows Server 2012 R2
Windows Server 2008 R2
CentOS 7.x (64-bit)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4/7.5 (64-bit)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP4/12 SP2 (64-bit)
