VSAN
Ever since vSAN 8 was announced, I’ve been waiting to try out the new Express Storage Architecture in my HomeLab, especially since the internal storage in my hosts is NVMe only. Yesterday the last piece of the puzzle was released, namely the new USB Network Native Driver v1.11 for ESXi 8 which I needed before reinstalling my hosts in order to get vSAN traffic isolation.
Once the hosts were installed and configured, it was time to enable vSAN and try out the new Express Storage Architecture. vSAN ESA is configured in the same way as the traditional OSA version, you just select that you want ESA at configuration time.
VMworld 2018 US is upon is, and as per usual this means a lot of new announcements. One of them is vSAN 6.7u1 which comes with a bunch of new and useful features. This release mainly focuses on improved operations and maintenance, with a bunch of nice new additions.
VMware has just announced vSAN v6.6, with over 20 new features. While new and shiny features are nice I’d like to highlight a couple that I think might be undervalued from release feature-set perspective, but highly valuable in day to day operations of a vSAN environment, otherwise known as Day 2 operations.
Both in 2014 and in 2015 I wrote pieces on the current status of VMware vSAN, and it’s time to revisit it for 2016.
My previous posts:
2014: VSAN: The Unspoken Future 2015: VMware VSAN: More than meets the eye.
vSAN 6.5 was released with vSphere 6.5, and brings a few new features to the table:
I recently set up a VMware Virtual SAN 6.1 Proof-of-Concept for a customer, configuring a 3-node cluster based on the following setup: