Hi vAdmins and storage admins,
VMware vSAN 8 U2 was announced today at VMware Explore, and this release includes many new features.
All the new features and improvements available with this release provide three primary benefits, such as petabyte-scale disaggregationa highly performant platform, and enhanced operational capabilities.
Let’s have a look!
vSAN HCI
We already now that VMware HCI provides a powerful foundation that can run all enterprise applications with its foundational value.
This release improved by enhancing this flexibility and choice by adding disaggregated storage capabilities, which provide the perfect environment for DBs and other storage-intensive workloads to optimize resource utilization and bring down costs. vSAN 8 U2 simplifies the day-to-day operations of administrators with features like auto-configuration of data default storage policies, Witness Traffic Separation in stretched clusters, and a prescriptive disk claim feature in ESA. Additionally, several enhancements will offer improved insight and prescriptive guidance and faster issue detection, remediation and time to resolution.
vSAN MAX
vSAN Max features refined resource efficiency and license consolidation, which can result in up to 30% lower TCO for mission-critical databases.
Organizations seeking the highest levels of storage density and scalability will benefit from the introduction of vSAN Max. With up to 8.6 petabytes of storage capacity available per cluster and 24 data nodes, customers can use the fine level of scalability to plan their budget and resources more effectively.
Through the unified, single-interface of vSAN Max, customers can consolidate their storage needs for more than 100 compute nodes, and achieve up to 3.6 million IOPS per cluster.
As the perfect solution for mission-critical workloads under high performance and resiliency requirements, vSAN Max is the ultimate choice for customers who require the highest levels of scalability and storage density.
vSAN ESA improvements
VMware has continued to optimize performance on its Express Storage Architecture to make sure customers extract every bit of value from modern hardware. Now, with vSAN 8 U2, users can enjoy up to a 30% increase in performance. This is due to features such as single object streaming write performance and DOM client enhancements.
Additionally, customers can increase infrastructure efficiency by consolidating up to 2.5x more VDI VMs per host on vSAN ESA-enabled clusters.
Moreover, vSAN 8 Update 2 offers improved sequential write performance for vSAN Max Disaggregated Storage deployments.
It also now supports file services, allowing users to benefit from all the advantages of vSAN ESA when dealing with file services in addition to the traditional workloads.
Enhanced Management
vSAN 8 U2 provides administrators with numerous convenient functionalities that make day-to-day operations easier. The auto-configuration of data default storage policies allows administrators to quickly update their storage configuration when the cluster size changes, meaning that operations are less time-consuming.
Additionally, Witness Traffic Separation in stretched clusters can be configured in the UI with ease. Furthermore, the prescriptive disk claim feature in ESA provides administrators with the flexibility and ease of claiming disks to suit their custom hardware.
With the introduction of vSAN 8 U1, vSAN introduced the Auto-Policy Management feature, which helps admins make sure their ESA clusters are performing with maximum resilience and efficiency.
With vSAN 8 U2, this capability gets even better. Whenever a host is added or removed from the cluster, the Auto-Policy Management feature will evaluate if the optimized default storage policy should be adjusted. If vSAN identifies that a change is necessary, it’s easy to do so–all you have to do is click the button that appears in the triggered health finding, and it will reconfigure the cluster-specific default storage policy with the revised settings. It will also rename the policy to reflect these new, optimized settings.
Thanks to this intuitive and streamlined process, administrators can be confident that their VM storage policies are well-suited to their cluster.
Performance monitoring and remediation improvements in vSAN ESA
The Top Contributors view in vSAN 8 U2 has been improved to help customers find performance hotspots over customizable lengths of time, as well as the ability to transpose the top contributors in IOPS, throughput, and latency.
Additionally, the vSAN I/O Trip Analyzer now provides analysis on workloads running in a vSAN stretched cluster, so users can identify primary latency sources and bottlenecks in other parts of the stack.
Summary
All of these enhancements will contribute to faster detection and remediation of performance issues in vSAN ESA, helping to optimize the management experience.
Take note that this launch will be officially accessible in September.
This post has come to an end, but I am preparing to write a subsequent post with the focus on the vSAN GUI and its capabilities.
I’m thrilled to be able to share this information with you about all the great new features! I hope it was useful to you and that you’re just as enthusiastic about them!
End of this post.
Disclaimer: This blog is based on my personal title and assumptions. No rights can be derived from this blog