VMware vSAN 7 Announced

With vSphere 7 comes vSAN 7, and it comes with a good set of new features and improvements. Here is a quick rundown of the highlights.

Simpler and More Complete Lifecycle Management at Scale #

vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) – Unified software and firmware management #

• Uses desired-state model for all lifecycle operations
  • Monitors compliance “drift”
  • Remediates back to desired state
• Built to manage server stack in cluster
  • Hypervisor
  • Drivers
  • Firmware
• Modular framework supports vendor firmware plugins
  • Dell
  • HPE

Integrated File Services Managed through vCenter #

Native file services for vSAN #

• vSAN 7 offers file services, provided through NFS v4.1 & v3
• Quota support

Continued Integration of Cloud Native Storage in vSphere and vSAN #

• File-based persistent volumes on vSAN
• Supports vVols
• Enables persistent volume encryption and snapshots
• Supports volume resizing
• Supports a mix of tooling
  • Wavefront
  • Prometheus
  • vRealize Operations

Improved VM Placement Intelligence with Stretched Clusters #

Integrated DRS awareness of Stretched Cluster configurations #

• Prioritizes I/O read locality over any VM site affinity rules
• Instructs DRS not to migrate VMs to desired site until resyncs complete
• Reduces I/O across ISL in recovery conditions
  • Improve VM read performance
  • Freeup ISL for resyncs to regain compliance

Improved Resilience with Stretched Cluster and 2-Node Topologies #

• “Replace Witness” workflow will now invoke an immediate repair to regain compliance
• Applies to stretched cluster and 2-node topologies
• Minimizes interruption with site-level protection

Intelligent Capacity Management for Stretched Cluster Topologies #

• Prevents capacity imbalance to impact VM uptime in stretched clusters
• Redirects active I/O to the site with available capacity
• Allows for VMs to continue non-disruptively in capacity strained conditions
• Assumes rebalancing within site has taken place

Unified Cloud Analytics for your VMware Powered Environments #

VMware Skyline integration with vSphere Health and vSAN Health #

• Skyline Health — All Customers
• Skyline Advisor — Production & Premier Customers
• Skyline Advisor — Premier Customers

Improved Consistency in VM Capacity Reporting #

Consistent VM-level capacity usage across vCenter UI and APIs #

Accurately accounts for used capacity of:

• Thin provisioned VMs
• SwapObject
• NamespaceObject
• Reduces confusion on capacity consumed by a VM

Easily View Memory Consumption for vSAN services #

New vSAN memory metric in the vSAN performance service #

• vSAN memory metric available in API and UI
• Time-based memory consumption details per host
• View consumption as a result of hardware and software configuration changes
  • Adding devices or disk groups
  • Enabling/disabling data services

Improved Awareness of vSphere Replication Data #

Visibility of vSphere Replication objects in vSAN capacity views #

• Easily identify objects created by and used with vSphere Replication
• New vSphere Replication object identity type in “Virtual Objects” listing
• New vSphere Replication categories for cluster-level capacity view

Increase Efficiency with the Latest Hardware #

Support for larger capacity devices #

• 32 TB physical capacity
• 1 PB in logical capacity (DD&C)
• Potential for Improved deduplication ratios with larger devices
• Designed to minimize data movement for support of new devices

Flexible Serviceability for NVMe Devices Improves Uptime #

Native support for planned and unplanned maintenance with NVMe hot plug #

Hot plug support for both vSphere and vSAN

• Better TCO through RASM
  • Reliability
  • Availability
  • Serviceability
  • Manageability

Minimize host restarts Reduces complexity of steps to service systems Select OEM platforms only

Improved Flexibility for Applications using Shared Disks on vSAN #

Removal of Eager Zero Thick (EZT) requirement for shared disk in vSAN #

• Eager Zero Thick (EZT) requirement eliminated for vSAN powering Oracle RAC on vSAN
• Applies to all shared virtual disks using multi-writer flag (MWF)
• Object Space Reservation (OSR) storage policy rule set to 100 is no longer necessary for shared disks

Closing Comments #

All in all, great improvements in this vSAN release. File services with NFS is interesting, as well as the integrated DRS awareness of Stretched Cluster configurations. Better visibility for vSAN memory resource utilization is also very welcome! Improved Lifecycle Management is also something that I’ve been looking forward to, and should make day 2 operations of a vSAN environment even better than it has been.

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• vSAN 8 ESA VMware Compatibility Guidance — Published 7 Dec, 2022
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