Hi vAdmins,
Time flies by, and so does the development of VMware vSan with the announcement of update 1 for version 8.
This blog describes some of the brand new features including major improvements.
What’s new?
Disaggregated Storage: Support for ESA, Support for stretched clusters (OSA) and support for across vCenter servers
Core platform Enhancements: Adaptive write path for ESA, Optimized processing per object (ESA), Durability components (ESA) and Datastore management improvements.
Simplified Management: Auto-policy management for Default storage policies (ESA), New Power CLI integration, Performance diagnostics.
Cloud Native Storage: CNS support for ESA, DPd support for common vSwitchtes and Thick Provisioning for vSan Direct Configuration.
Disaggregated Storage with the Express Storage Architecture.
Starting with the release of vSan 8 Update 1, VMware supports to share vSAN storage resources to others, such as vSAN clusters, or compute-only clusters for ESA storage. U are able to mount remote vSAN datastores living in other vSAN clusters, and also use an ESA cluster as the external storage resource for a vSphere cluster
Consume storage externally using vSAN Stretched Clusters
This new release introduces vSan Strechted clusters in disaggregated topology for OSA, with this feature you have the option to consume storage from a vSAN stretched cluster to external clusters.
From now It is possible to use this flexible storage feature including optimize the network paths for certain topologies to improve the performance capabilities of stretched cluster configurations.
Better Performance using New Adaptive Write Path
Another great performance improvement is a new adaptive write path that is specifically tailored to write large I/Os in a more efficient way. When incoming I/Os meet a set of criteria, the data payload itself will bypass the usual step of being written the durable log in a mirror across three hosts. vSAN will create the metadata for those I/Os and commit the metadata to the log on the performance leg, while committing the data payload itself as a RAID-6 stripe with double parity, andwritten to the capacity leg.
Command-line Enhancements for Automation and Consistency
VMware’s PowerShell snap-in for managing vSphere. In vSAN 8 U1, PowerCLI has been enhanced to support many of the new capabilities in both the vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) and Original Storage Architecture (OSA), including:
•Support for Disaggregation (ESA)
•Support for Disaggregation when using stretched clusters (OSA)
•Support for Disaggregation when using multiple vCenter Servers (OSA)
•vSAN cluster shutdown capabilities
•Object format updates and custom namespace objects
Higher Levels of Detail for Improved Performance Analysis
This release gives much more insight into perfomance characteristics. This new increased interval offers metrics from 5 minutes to 30 seconds . By increasing this interval, storage administrators have much more insight into the performance performance characteristics of the components. This simplifies troubleshooting.
Adjusting the metrics to 30 seconds makes the graph much flatter
vSAN 8 U1 introduces three improvements to help ensure important system data is readily available for use in troubleshooting issues.
•Improved storage of vSAN trace objects
•Captures more diagnostics data for troubleshooting
•Retains up to 6 days of trace logs
The VM I/O Trip Analyzer has been enhanced to include a new scheduler mechanism.
Another usefull feature is the the ability to schedule an analysis, ideal for troubleshooting repetitive issues.
Recap:
This blog contains a summary of just a few improvements. For the full update, see the VMware vSAN 8 U1 release notes.
End of this post.
Disclaimer: This blog is based on my personal title and assumptions. No rights can be derived from this blog.