VMware Virtual SAN

VMware Virtual SAN is a direct-attached storage virtualization technology that combines server drives and flash drives into shared distributed storage for high-performance, fault-tolerant virtual machines.

2022: VMware vSAN 8

On September 1, 2022, VMware announced the release of VMware vSAN 8, a failover virtual storage cluster solution.

According to the company, VMware vSAN 8.0 has:

Updated vSAN Express Storage Architecture

vSAN 8 introduces the vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) hyperconverged infrastructure architecture. It delivers optimal performance and efficiency on HPC storage.

With NVMe-based TLC flash memory, the ESA architecture has many capabilities with standard vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA), which will also continue to be supported for September 2022 standard hardware (devices SATASAS /).

The key structural features of vSAN 8 ESA are a redesigned and patched file system (LFS), an updated log-structured object manager, and an additional format for disk objects.

The updated ESA capabilities provide opportunities in the following aspects:

• Performance without tradeoff. There are two main points here that optimize performance:
  • Change storage and processing structure data for algorithms RAID 5/6 erasure coding. RAID 5/6 is now close to RAID-1-based. LFS and additional disk object format provide data integration and fault tolerance while maintaining read/write link speed.
  • Intelligent I/O traffic management for vSAN network traffic - now the processing speed of I/O traffic is close to native for the devices in use. This is achieved, among other things, by adaptive prioritization of traffic and its sending at the moments of the lowest channel load.

• Supreme resource and space efficiency. An adaptive data processing algorithm on the RAID-5 that checks the number of hosts in the cluster and chooses the best way to place data (works starting with three hosts). vSAN ESA also has the ability to detect host changes, which entails revising RAID-5 data structures and changing data placement policies. In this case, the RAID-5 uses less raw storage capacity while maintaining reliability and manageability. Data compression mechanisms have also been completely redesigned to optimize network load and CPU load. Compression is enabled by default and can be modified at the individual virtual machine level using storage policies instead of changing the configuration at the cluster level.

The updated compression method gives up to 4x improvement for each block of 4KB size when compared to Original Storage Architecture. Also, the CPU load is significantly less for ESA than for OSA. Data encryption also occurs now on the upper layers of the vSAN core. Since encryption is carried out for already compressed data, the encryption process occurs only once, which means that the data flows between hosts are also encrypted. This allows you to get rid of unnecessary decrypt/encrypt steps and gives less load on the CPU and network, freeing up resources to keep virtual machines running.

• Intuitive, agile operations. There are two main points here: Storage pool construct - vSAN 8 ESA, in addition to the concept of disk groups, discrete caching and tiers of capacities (capacity tiers), gives users the opportunity to combine devices into a pool (storage pool), in which all devices of the host pool can give capacity to the total capacity of the vSAN infrastructure. This optimizes disk maintenance and data availability management (and reduces costs). Optimized storage deployment and resource management - Now there are automated checks to understand that the ESA architecture is running on supported hardware. This will reduce the number of problematic installations.
• Ready-for-anything resilience. This item includes scalable and high-performance snapshots, which are now made quickly and efficiently. Now snapshots do not dramatically affect the performance of virtual machines, and the time for the consolidation of snapshots has decreased very significantly. Native snapshot will be available not only in vSphere, but also for third-party solutions that use the VADP framework for VM backup.

Standard vSAN Original Storage Architecture

Classic vSAN 8 has increased the logical buffer capacity limit by almost three times - from 600 GB to 1.6 TB. This will allow you to more tightly host virtual machines while maintaining the required level of performance. Workloads can now maintain maximum performance for longer periods of time.

Both vSAN architectures - ESA and OSA

vSAN Proactive insights capability - vSAN 8 users have now received a higher level of compatibility through proactive insights functionality that alerts them to all potential software and hardware compatibility issues, even if they are not part of the Customer Experience Improvement Program. These changes are available for both architectures.

Download availability for VMware Cloud Foundation +, VMware vSphere 8, VMware vSAN 8 and VMware Edge Compute Stack 2 products is expected until October 28, 2022.

2021: VMware vSAN 7 Update 2

On March 19, 2021, VMware introduced an updated version of VMware vSAN 7 Update 2.

According to the company, the updated vSAN 7 Update 2 solution includes HCI Mesh technology, which works on the basis of a software-oriented approach to disaggregating computing and storage resources, which was first introduced in the previous vSAN 7 Update 1. This solution has increased the number of use cases, which is especially important for users who want to optimize resource utilization outside the existing vSAN environment. HCI Mesh allows clusters designed exclusively for computing, or clusters without HCI technology to remotely use vSAN storage in a data center, which also allows you to scale computing and storage resources independently.

vSAN 7 also provides additional capabilities for more efficient support of various network topologies. These include VMware Distributed Resource Schedule (DRS) features to achieve more stable disaster recovery performance, and support for vSAN file services for "stretched" and dual-node clusters.

Additionally, VMware continues to implement vSAN 7 performance-enhancing features such as vSAN over Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and deletion code optimization for RAID 5/6 that reduce processor utilization and deliver performance gains for specific application types.

To optimize the overall security of applications running in containers, vSphere 7 Update 2 introduces sensitive containers for vSphere Pods based on AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Encrypted State (SEV-ES) hardware and technology. For traditional environments, the updated vSphere 7 Update 2 now includes vSphere Native Key Provider, which provides basic KMS server capabilities and optimizes functionality. enciphering In addition, the updated version of vSphere 7 includes FIPS verification for VMware vCenter Server services, which optimizes audits.

VMware vSAN provides self-service capabilities for development teams to provide container storage for application development and deployment, while providing transparency and oversight for efficient infrastructure operations.

2020: VMware vSAN 7.0

On March 12, 2020, the company VMware announced the future release of an updated version of VMware vSAN 7.0 - a fault-tolerant solution storages for virtual machines local storage -. hostservers VMware ESXi

Changes and additions to the updated version of VMware vSAN 7, noted by the developer:

• with Integration vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) to update clusters. Previously administrators vSphere , they used Update Manager (VUM) for platform and driver updates, and utilities from server manufacturers to update their firmware. In the presented version, these processes are combined into a single mechanism under the control of vSphere Lifecycle Manager:

vLCM can be used to apply installation images, monitor compliance, and bring the cluster to the desired level of updates. This simplifies infrastructure monitoring for timely updates and component compliance with the VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG) through a centralized, cluster-wide approach, VMware emphasized.

• Native File Services for vSAN. With Native File Services, the vSAN cluster supports NFS v3 and v4.1 external storage management. This allows them to be used in conjunction with other capabilities such as iSCSI services, encryption, deduplication, and compression. Through the vCenter interface, you can manage the entire storage lifecycle based on different technologies and turn it into a means of controlling the entire storage infrastructure.

• Deploy applications using Enhanced Cloud Native Storage. Cloud Native Storage (CNS) is the functionality of VMware vSphere and the Kubernetes orchestration platform (K8s), which allows on-demand deployment and maintenance of storage for virtual machines containing containers. It is a storage lifecycle management platform for containerized applications. In the updated version, these functions were even more developed. Persistent volumes can support encryption and snapshots. The vSphere Add-on for Kubernetes (aka Project Pacific) is also fully supported, which allows containerized applications to be deployed in vSAN storage clusters.

• Other improvements:
  • Integrated DRS awareness of Stretched Cluster configurations. DRS monitors that the virtual machine is on the same site during the process of full synchronization between sites. At the end of the process, DRS moves the machine to the desired site in accordance with the rules.
  • Immediate repair operation after a vSAN Witness Host is replaced. The procedure for replacing the Witness component, which protects against partitioning a distributed cluster at the site level, has been greatly simplified. In the vCenter interface, there is a Replace Witness button, with which you can start the procedure for restoring the configuration and replacing this component.
  • Stretched Cluster I/O redirect based on an imbalance of capacity across sites. In stretched vSAN clusters, you can configure fault protection at the single VM level by allocating excess capacity to the cluster. As a result, different settings may appear at different sites, and there will be an imbalance in available capacity and I/O load. vSAN 7 allows I/O flow to be redirected to a less busy site transparently to virtual machines.
  • Accurate VM level space reporting across vCenter UI for vSAN powered VMs. vSAN 7 has accurate storage status reporting capabilities for virtual machines, just like the rest of the storage in Cluster View and Host View views.
  • Improved Memory reporting for ongoing optimization. In the interface and through the API, a metric of memory consumption over time is available. It allows you to understand how memory consumption changes during changes in the cluster (adding and deleting hosts, changing configuration).
  • Visibility of vSphere Replication objects in vSAN capacity views. vSAN 7 allows administrators to identify vSphere Replication objects at the virtual machine and cluster level, simplifying resource management for replication needs.
  • Support for larger capacity devices. vSAN 7 supports new high-capacity, high-density storage devices.
  • Native support for planned and unplanned maintenance with NVMe hotplug. Hot Add and Remove is available for NVMe devices to reduce maintenance time and ease of maintenance.
  • Removal of Eager Zero Thick (EZT) requirement for shared disk in vSAN. Shared disks in vSAN do not need to be created in EZT format, which speeds up the deployment of workloads such as Oracle RAC in a vSAN cluster.^[1]

2019: VMware vSAN 6.7 Update 3 release and Enterprise Plus edition announced

On August 14, 2019, it became known that VMware announced the imminent release of an updated version of the solution for creating failover storage clusters - VMware vSAN 6.7 Update 3. The main topic of change is support for cloud environments for hosting virtual machines (VMs) and working with containerized applications.

Support for application containers in cloud environments

As noted in VMware, containers have become one of the main models for distributing applications in the cloud. The containerization technology itself simplifies the deployment and maintenance of applications by allocating them to microservices, but all processes around them become more complex (orchestration, organization of persistent storage, network communication).

vSAN 6.7 Update 3 has built-in permanent storage tools for application containers, including cloud environments. vSAN cloud native storage technology supports all key API calls to storage within Kubernetes clusters via the Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver. Developers will be able to apply SPBM storage policies when deploying new pods and mounting volumes with persistent storage, just as they do with virtual machine disks.

According to the developer, if you use Virtual Volumes on a vSAN platform, you can get even more benefits:

• Deploy container repositories through the API in parallel with the containers themselves.
• The ability to port applications between the private and public cloud within a hybrid environment with support for a single set of operations and tools.

Native Hybrid vSAN Infrastructure Environment

According to VMware, hybrid environments are becoming a very common delivery model for IT services, since it is the combination of private and public clouds that has the greatest effect in terms of scaling and ensuring the quality of service delivery. At the same time, administrators want Docker applications to also be able to seamlessly move between public and private clouds with all their storage.

vSAN in the presented version will provide integration with cloud providers, including the Big Four Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM, which will allow using the same set of vSAN tools and utilities for container storage in the cloud as in private infrastructure, VMware claims.

Unified vSAN management for containers and virtual machines

One virtual machine can have many application containers, up to several hundred. If there are problems with the storage for one of the containers, it becomes very difficult to understand its cause. The updated version of the vSAN provides administrators with granular visibility inside the VM up to the container level, which allows monitoring the state of individual container stores at the volume level for each of them.

Within a single storage space, you can analyze capacity utilization by virtual machines and containers:

All this will allow DevOps teams to quickly solve problems with repositories of containerized applications through the standard vSphere Client console, VMware emphasized.

Intelligent I/O controls

According to the developer, the updated version of the vSAN works even more efficiently when exchanging data between the write buffer and the capacity tier. This optimization is especially noticeable for sequential writes (which is very important for resynchronization and data recovery processes).

Adaptive resynchronization takes place within the framework of many parallel streams, which increases its efficiency:

Also in vSAN 6.7 U3, additional metrics have appeared regarding use CPU host-servers ESXi (especially relevant for, and deduplications enciphering compression). In addition, the vsantop command has appeared, which shows these and many other useful metrics:

Other improvements to vSAN 6.7 Update 3 highlighted by the developer:

• Capacity management mechanisms have been improved to trigger a resynchronization operation based on available capacity. If a disk group is full, resynchronization operations are paused to prevent storage corruption.
• The administrator can select the option of automatic or manual rebalancing of data in the cluster. Since each infrastructure is different, a fine-tuning of the rebalancing mechanism is available, depending on the needs of the administrator.
• SPBM policies are applied in batches, which accelerates performance when the policy structure is changed.
• Maintenance or configuration changes during resynchronization operations may cause this process to terminate incorrectly, so in SAN 6.7 U3, the vSphere Client has a better understanding of when this process is running and does not interfere with it.
• A pre-check simulation mechanism that allows the administrator to understand what will happen if the cluster is reconfigured or maintained.
• Changing the encryption, compression, or deduplication configuration requires Disk format changes (DFCs). If there are not enough resources for this process, then a special check will let you know about it even before the operation is performed.
• vSAN itself offers to update to a new major release or roll in updates.
• Previously, vSAN required vCenter to be the same version or newer, in the version presented, support for past versions of vCenter has become more flexible.
• With vSAN 6.7 U3, it's easier to enable vSAN Support Insight and interact with VMware support.
• iSCSI LUNs presented from vSANs can be resorted without the need to take the volume offline.
• SCSI-3 persistent reservations (SCSI-3 PR) enable native support for Windows Server Failover Clusters (WSFCs) that require a shared disk.

Also in August, it became known that VMware, as well as for many other products, is introducing the Enterprise Plus edition for the vSAN platform. This license will include a combination of vSAN Enterprise product and vRealize Operations Advanced cloud management.

All this will give the following functionality in a combination of two solutions:

• Geographically stretched clusters with local protection capabilities and synchronous replication.
• Native vSAN Encryption with deduplication and compression. Solutions such as CloudLink, Hytrust, SafeNet, Thales and Vormetric can be used as KMIP providers.
• Continuous performance optimization with predictive analytics and proactive planning capabilities.
• Intelligent problem solving and advanced trableshooting based on metric analytics and logs using application review tools at the infrastructure level.^[2]

2018: VMware vSAN 6.7 Update 1

On September 6, 2018, it became known that VMware announced a solution for creating fault-tolerant storage based on VMware vSAN 6.7 Update 1 servers.

1. Master Cluster quickstart.

The New Cluster Wizard includes the following processes:

• Deploy services such as vSphere HA, vSphere DRS, and vSAN.
• Add hosts (multiple hosts at the same time).
• Type of vSAN deployment.
• Network configuration, including vSphere Distributed Switching and Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC).
• Disk group configuration.
• Deduplication, compression, and encryption services.

2. Update drivers and firmware via Update Manager.

Through the vSphere Update Manager (VUM), you can update the microcode of the I/O controller using the driver update utility from the server vendor. Thus, the update of the I/O adapter driver can be included in the host update cycle and not do this separately.

VUM will also support custom OEM images from server manufacturers, as well as offline ESXi host update procedures.

If VUM has not found an update utility from the vendor, it suggests downloading it.

3. Protection mechanisms for decommissioning hosts and putting them into service mode.

In vSAN 6.7 U1, preliminary checks appeared during the transition of hosts to Maintenance mode and Decomission. In this case, the simulation checks whether all host machines can successfully move to other servers, and only in this case does the real process start.

This eliminates the time cost of potentially failed host server operations.

Added alerts that synchronization is in progress and that there are no other servers in the cluster in maintenance mode. In addition, the configuration "object repair timer delay" has been added, which sets the time interval before the start of vSAN cluster reboot operations to align with storage policies.

4. Different vROPs representations for conventional and stretched vSAN clusters.

With integration vRealize Operations 7.0 interface vCenter , there are two different views for conventional and stretched clusters that show different metrics and insights.

5. Improved Capacity reporting capabilities.

Capacity utilization reports provide information about available storage, depending on the storage policy selected.

You can also see how much storage will be needed if deduplication and compression are disabled, and you can view the history of space usage in a vSAN cluster based on changes in deduplication and compression factors.

6. TRIM/UNMAP support.

These are options for returning unused disk space back to available vSAN capacity. TRIM/UNMAP capabilities allow you to return space to a cluster for many guest operating systems and machine configurations.

7. Supports Mixed MTU mode for stretched clusters.

In vSAN 6.7, it became possible to allocate Witness traffic to a separate server uplink, and Update 1 added the MTU Size configuration function for Witness traffic separately from MTU Size for cross-site traffic.

8. Updated infrastructure sizing tools.

vSAN 6.7 Update 1 provides users with improved tools to plan their infrastructure and determine its future characteristics.

9. Improved Health Check features.

Now they also cover the firmware of storage controllers, integration with which appeared in this version of vSAN. Also, with the help of tests of the vSAN network environment, you can get a report on what bandwidth is available on the network. In addition, Health Check has a check for the unavailability of swap objects.

10. Improved diagnostics for VMware GSS support personnel.

The vSAN has built-in vSAN Support Insight diagnostics and support that have evolved in this update. Now vSAN 6.7 Update 1 has detailed performance graphs in various aspects.

The Network diagnostic mode function provides VMware GSS engineers with network status data, which makes it easier to work with technical support calls and reduces the amount of support bundles collected and transmitted to VMware.

The updated VMware vSAN 6.7 Update 1 is expected to be available simultaneously with VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 1 until November 2018^[3].

2017: VMware vSAN 6.6

On April 14, 2017, VMware released VMware vSAN 6.6. Product features include built-in hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) security, low total cost of ownership (TCO), and up to 50% performance growth in all-flash storage.

According to the company, the release of VMware vSAN 6.6 will help customers develop their infrastructure with minimal risk, using built-in security, reliable high availability implementation, and the choice of hardware platforms, including Intel Optane Flash Technology (SSD). The latest release will help reduce total cost of ownership through intelligent self-service and cloud analytics operations, providing flexibility and performance to support today's applications and hardware.

VMware vSAN 6.6 Demo Presentation, (2017)

Since the initial release of VMware vSAN in 2014, customers have been using vSANs with savings in total cost of ownership and ease of management of computing resources and storage. VMware vSAN 6.6 is equipped with innovative elements, in particular several new options for the industry, and will further contribute to the widespread implementation of hyper-converged infrastructure, helping customers modernize their data centers to gain a competitive advantage with new flexibility. Yanbing Lee, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Storage and Availability Business Unit, VMware

vSAN 6.6 is the sixth generation of built-in enterprise storage from VMware for vSphere. The storage is suitable for various use cases, including business critical and cloud applications, virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs), remote office/branch office (ROBO), to ensure disaster tolerance of the infrastructure. Release 6.6 will offer customers a way to improve the security of the infrastructure that ensures availability for business-critical applications. Among the possibilities:

• Native protection of hyperconverged infrastructures:
  • A software-defined storage solution with built-in protection provides simplified key management to protect against unwanted data access. vSAN 6.6 customers can select any vSAN-certified hardware to reduce hardware costs.

• Affordable vSAN management:
  • vSAN 6.6 will allow monitoring and management of storage platforms if VMware vCenter Server is unavailable.

• Reduced TCO, enhanced storage security, and intelligent operations

vSAN-based hyperconverged infrastructure solutions are designed to help IT teams upgrade their data center infrastructure despite reduced or constrained budgets and increased demand from businesses and end users. vSAN 6.6 will help customers solve these problems by reducing the economic pressure on business and IT through functionality:

• Efficient and cost-effective site protection:
  • vSAN 6.6 offers enhanced stretched clusters with local protection to provide fault tolerance both within and between sites.

• Proactive cloud analytics:
  • vSAN Cloud Analytics is an analytics tool that provides status notifications and customized recommendations to help customers optimize their vSAN environment in real time. Cloud analytics can be constantly improved using new checkpoints and functionality without any input from customers.

• Automated equipment maintenance:
  • Automated hardware maintenance will speed up initial hardware configuration, simplify software installation, and enable one-click firmware updates to achieve greater hardware predictability without sacrificing the breadth of hardware choice.

VMware vSAN 6.6 will provide:

• Faster flash performance:
  • Optimizing data services algorithms with vSAN 6.6 will help accelerate the performance of Flash systems used in business and cloud-critical applications. In addition to existing VMware Horizon support, approved architectures provide support for Hadoop, Citrix XenApp, InterSystems Cache, and Splunk applications.

• Support for next-generation hardware:
  • The vSAN architecture is designed to support the latest flash technologies and enables vSAN solutions to adopt new technologies as they enter the market. For example, vSAN 6.6 will provide support for the recently launched Intel Optane solid-state memory, which can improve the performance of write-critical applications such as big data analytics and streaming.

2016

VMware Virtual SAN 6.5

On October 18, 2016, VMware announced the release of the converged Virtual SAN 6.5 solution.

This release will help reduce total cost of ownership costs by an additional 50% by supporting containers and physical workloads. iSCSI support has been implemented, eliminating the need for network equipment costs with dual-node configurations for remote offices or branch offices (ROBOs). Added support for all-flash arrays in Virtual SAN Standard Edition.

VMware Virtual SAN 6.5 Capabilities

• iSCSI support - Allows Virtual VSAN storage to act as an iSCSI target for external physical workloads that include clustered applications, including clustered Microsoft SQL Server workloads.
• Container Support - VMware Virtual SAN will provide a highly available data layer for containerized applications with VMware vSphere Integrated Containers.
• Two-Node Direct Connect - eliminates the need for switches and routers between ROBO VSAN systems, allowing customers to reduce infrastructure costs for each site by 15-20%.
• REST APIs and Expanded PowerCLI-Enable customers to accelerate with enterprise-level automation that gives Virtual SAN environments flexibility and manageability comparable to cloud environments.
• 512E Hard Drives and Solid-State Drives (SSDs) - 512-byte disk drive compatibility makes it possible to support high-capacity drives.

VMware announced the introduction of Virtual SAN Standard Edition in the fourth quarter of 2016, introducing support for basic all-flash configurations, which will allow customers to reduce the cost of total storage costs.

Hyperconverged vSAN

On February 10, 2016, VMware released vSAN 6.2. It is designed specifically to deploy NAND flash storage and has expanded^[4] hyperconverged product line^[4].

A hyperconverged computer system integrates in one complex not only the management of computing resources, storage and network functions that are inherent in converged systems, but also additional functions: deduplication, compression and distribution of data across storage levels, data encryption and/or high-level user authentication within the security system, hypervisor, etc.

According to VMware, the goal of the release is to improve data maintenance efficiency for Flash-NAND solid-state storage, hybrid and traditional hard drives, in addition to new QoS features and performance and capacity monitoring capabilities.

This vSAN release simplifies data storage creation and management while accelerating data operations. By forming a virtual layer, IT administrators get complete information about storage resources, allowing them to allocate the necessary computing and capacity resources to virtual machines, combined into a common virtualized platform.

VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 is a radically simplified enterprise-class storage solution for building a hyper-converged VMware infrastructure. VMware's hyper-converged infrastructure enables data center infrastructure transformation with a high-performance, cost-effective architecture that combines computing resources, storage, and network based on standard x86 servers.

Properties

• Dramatically simplify storage. Virtual SAN optimizes resource initialization in vSphere environments. You only need a few clicks in the standard vSphere web client to deploy the vault. With VM-centric policies, service levels can be configured and modified in seconds. Integrated management capabilities simplify monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting.
• High performance. Virtual SAN is built into the VMware hypervisor and optimizes the I/O path for significantly higher performance than a virtual or external device. It is the best hyper-converged storage with up to 90,000 I/O per second per server for the most demanding enterprise applications.
• Ready for enterprise environments. Virtual SAN provides advanced storage services for virtual machines, including Flash optimization, built-in distributed RAID, and Quality of Service (QoS) settings. Storage efficiency is achieved by eliminating duplication, compression, and data protection with Erasure Coding. Virtual SAN supports standard integration with vSphere High Availability, Fault Tolerance, and vSphere Replication for asynchronous replication with a recovery point target of up to 5 minutes. And distributed Virtual SAN clusters provide environment-level recovery even when you select a zero recovery point target.
• Linear scalability. Virtual SAN supports predictable and elastic storage scaling without disrupting workflows, eliminating the need for complete hardware replacement, large purchases, and redundant provisioning.
• 50% reduction in total cost of ownership. Virtual SAN reduces capital costs by leveraging standard x86 servers and components, and operational servers by automating management of computing and server resources with a single virtualized platform.

The fourth generation of the product features a low total cost of ownership (TCO) and provides storage optimization capabilities - eliminating write duplication and enhanced deployment, management automation.

Features of Virtual SAN 6.2

• Compress and eliminate duplication during writing.
  • Reduce storage size and storage costs by increasing storage efficiency by up to 7x.

• Erasure Coding mechanism.
  • 2x more usable storage capacity with no loss of storage reliability through single or double parity to ensure one or two failures (also known as RAID 5 and RAID 6).

• QoS parameters.
  • Control, restrict, and monitor I/O usage for each virtual machine, which eliminates interference between virtual machines, preventing one machine from monopolizing storage I/O at the expense of the others.

• Automatically configurable software.
  • Simplify and automate network configuration and configuration, hardware validation, and ongoing lifecycle management.

• SAP support.
  • Support for business-critical SAP applications such as SAP Core and SAP HANA.

• Enhanced integration
  • Integration with VMware Horizon cloud management.

2015

Preparing for VMware Virtual SAN 6.0

On February 4, 2015, it became known that as part of the VMware vSphere 6.0 update, the company updated VMware Virtual SAN to version 6.0 after version 1.0, the second version of the product.

Supports All Flash architecture to create a storage cluster.

Two VSAN deployment options have become available:

• Hybrid - Virtual SAN uses SSD drives for caching, and regular HDD drives are used to store VMs. The maximum possible configurations of this architecture have increased - there are 64 hosts in the cluster.

• All Flash - Virtual SAN uses existing Flash drives for both caching and VM storage.

Architectural differences:

VMware Virtual SAN - Ready for Enterprise-Class Applications, 2014

VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 Architectures, 2014

In the All Flash configuration, caching devices cache writes and do not make read caching. In the hybrid configuration, 30% of the SSD cache capacity is used for the write buffer, 70% for the read cache.

Virtual SAN Flash caching Architectures, 2014

The developers claim that the Virtual SAN solution is ready for full industrial operation.

• High Density Direct Attached Storage (HDDAS) capability.

Virtual SAN clusters are now easy to use in environments with blade systems. Both SDD and HDD devices are supported for them, including flash storage of blade servers.

If earlier blade systems were not very suitable for organizing clusters due to physical restrictions on local storage, now this is a very suitable use case for the corporate infrastructure. Support for devices will be strictly monitored and constantly updated in VMware HCL.

• New file system and On-Disk format.

Virtual SAN in VMware vSphere 5.5 used a modified VMFS file system format with a modified locking mechanism called VMFS-L. VSAN 6.0 uses the VSAN FS file system specifically for storage clusters.

• Proactive Rebalance functions.

Virtual SAN 6.0 has the ability to change the balancing of objects across virtual disks if a new vSphere node is connected or if the disks are 80% or more full. This is done through Ruby Console.

• VSAN Fault Domains.

Now, in VSAN, you can define failure domains, that is, groups of hosts that can have a simultaneous failure (for example, a power failure on the rack) so that all their objects are duplicated in other domains. Object replicas occur not at the host level, but at the Fault Domains level (in this case, the storage infrastructure will survive a single rack failure).

• New functions for disks (Serviceability Functions).

Light LED on failures - switching on the LED indicator in case of failure. Turn on disk LED manually - turn on the LED indicator manually for the disk so that it can be found on the array. Marking a disk as local - if the disk is not detected as local, it can be marked manually from the GUI. Marking a disk as SSD - now this option is in the GUI if the disk is not automatically recognized as an SSD.

• Networking enhancements.

Virtual SAN 6 now supports Layer 3 configurations. Configuration with Jumbo Frames is available. Added support for vDS and Network IO Control (NetIOC) capabilities.

• The new VMDK virtual disk type is vsanSparse.

Previously, standard Redo disks were used, they were not adapted for caching and other VSAN FS functions, so they made a new type of vsanSparse disk.

• Enhanced Disk/Disk Group Evolution features.

The ability to evacuate data from an individual disk or group prior to physical decommissioning. Previously, you had to transfer the entire host to Maintenance Mode to make it inconvenient when a single disk malfunctions.

• New Resynchronization Dashboard View

This view shows the status of objects that are in a resynchronization state for one reason or another. The approximate timing of the synchronization termination is shown.

• New 3rd Party File Services.

Third-party vendors can add their solutions to VMware Virtual SAN.

• Full support for PowerCLI cmdlets.

Previously, the PowerCLI interface was unofficially supported, now cmdlets are documented and supported.

• Life Monitoring Services (VSAN Health Services).

Virtual SAN components have status information available.

• Storage Consumption Models.

Virtual SAN 6.0 storage usage can be visualized when a VM storage policy is created or changed.

The company plans to announce the availability of VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 in addition.

2014

Support for VMware Virtual SAN ecosystem announced

On February 17, 2014, VMware announced the launch of the VMware Virtual SAN Partner Support Program, the company's first software-defined storage product.

As of February 17, 2014, the product is available in public beta testing mode and from the moment it goes on sale will be certified for working with servers and devices, Cisco,, Dell,, EMC,, Fusion-io,, HGST,, and HP IBM- Intel LSI they Samsung Electronics SanDisk Seagate offer a wide range of capabilities for working with VMware Virtual SAN.

The company plans to launch VMware Virtual SAN on sale during the first quarter of 2014.

Together with VMware Virtual SAN, VMware offers two implementation options: off-the-shelf VMware Virtual SAN Ready ^[5] and a list of compatible hardware platformsHardware ^[6].

VMware Virtual SAN 1.0

On March 11, 2014, VMware announced the release of a new version - VMware Virtual SAN 1.0.

Supporting VMware Virtual SAN, the developers have updated the VMware vSphere platform and the VMware Horizon View desktop virtualization solution, which supports desktop placement in VSAN storage.

Updated components:

• vCenter Server Update 1
• ESXi 5.5 Update 1
• Horizon View 5.3.1
• Horizon Workspace 1.8

The update affected products that provide VSAN support:

• VMware vCloud Director 5.5.1
• VMware vCenter Operations Manager Advanced 5.8.1
• VMware vCenter Hyperic 5.8.1 Server and Agent Part
• VMware vCenter Site recovery manager 5.5.1
• VMware vCloud Application Director 6.0.1

Upgrading from VSAN beta versions to an official release is not supported.

All updated components of VMware solutions are available on the vendor's website.

VMware Virtual SAN Launch

On March 20, 2014, VMware announced the launch of VMware Virtual SAN, a software-defined storage product.

VMware Virtual SAN is available from $2.495 per processor. Desktop product - $50 per user.

As of March 20, 2014, the purchase of a kit from VMware Virtual SAN with VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced is available at a price of $2.875 per processor.

Upgrading VMware Virtual Storage Appliance to VMware Virtual SAN is available at a 20% discount on retail prices.

2013

VMware Virtual SAN Announced

VMware announced the release of VMware Virtual SAN technology on August 27, 2013.

VMware Virtual SAN is designed on a distributed architecture that linearly scales storage services to meet application needs. By seamlessly integrating VMware Virtual SAN with VMware vSphere, VMware has redesigned the role of a hypervisor for delivering virtual computing and storage services in an adaptive and flexible way. Distributed architecture enables VMware Virtual SAN to deliver I/O performance comparable to medium-performance storage arrays.

The solution provides policy-based management functionality for virtual machines that automates storage space utilization and management.Using the resources of server solid state drives () SSD and hard magnetic drives (), HDD VMware Virtual SAN significantly reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), test and development environments, as well as other applications.

storage systems It is possible to increase capacity and capacity by adding servers as needed.

VMware Virtual SAN will be available free of charge as part of the public beta program in the third quarter of 2013.

Notes