Why upgrade vSAN? Here is a list of features, release by release.

I was with one of our large EMEA customers last week, and we talked quite a bit about the evolution of vSAN. This customer is already one of our larger vSAN customers with very many clusters, and many, many nodes. They have also been a great vSAN reference for us, having first deployed the initial vSAN 5.5 release. One point that hit home was that they found it was quite difficult to determine the various features and enhancements that were introduced in each vSAN release. They mentioned that having a quick reference would be useful as they could use it…

What’s in the vSphere and vSAN 6.7 release?

Today VMware unveils vSphere version 6.7, which also includes a new version of vSAN. In this post, I am going to highlight some of the big-ticket items that are in vSphere 6.7 from a core storage perspective, and also some of the new feature that you will find in vSAN 6.7. I’ll also cover some of the new enhancements coming in Virtual Volumes (VVols).

2-node vSAN – witness network design considerations

It seems that 2-node vSAN for ROBO (remote office/branch office) deployments are becoming more and more popular. The fact that one can now connect the 2 vSAN hosts at the remote office directly back-to-back without needing a 10Gb switch has reduced the cost extensively. And with the introduction of a vSAN Enterprise for ROBO license edition with vSAN 6.6.1, you get the full feature set of vSAN on 2-node deployments. This new edition builds on the vSAN Advanced edition, and enables the use of features like native encryption and stretched clusters on a per-VM pricing model for smaller sites. The…

New vSAN Stretched Cluster Topology now supported

After publishing the vSAN Networking Guide earlier this year, Paudie O’Riordain and I received numerous questions regarding support on having different stretched clusters hosting each other’s witness appliances. These queries arose because we discussed a 2-node (ROBO) topology which allowed this to sort of configuration (i.e. the cross hosting of witnesses) via special request. But in the networking guide, we explicitly stated that this was not supported with vSAN stretched clusters. However, after some further testing by our engineering teams, we can now relax this restriction if there are 4 independent sites hosting the different stretched clusters. In this case,…

Erasure Coding and Quorum on vSAN

I was looking at the layout of RAID-5 object configuration the other day, and while these objects were deployed on vSAN with 4 components, something caught my eye. It wasn’t the fact that there were 4 components, which is what one would expect since we implement RAID-5 as a 3+1, i.e. 3 data segments and 1 parity segment. No, what caught my eye was that one of the components had a different vote count. Now, RAID-5 and RAID-6 erasure coding configurations are not the same as RAID-1. With RAID-1, we deploy multiple copies of the data depending on how many…

What’s new in vSAN 6.6?

vSAN 6.6 is finally here. This sixth iteration of vSAN is the quite a significant release for many reasons, as you will read about shortly. In my opinion, this may be the vSAN release with the most amount of new features. Let’s cut straight to the chase and highlight all the features of this next version of vSAN. There is a lot to tell you about. Now might be a good time to grab yourself a cup of coffee.