Organizations today use a variety of applications to run their business, each with unique processing power, storage capacity, and performance requirements. Advanced analytics, AI applications and cloud-native applications are increasingly employed, while relational databases and virtual desktops remain important. The increasing diversity of workloads and their scaling dynamics drive the need for flexible infrastructure that enables these mission-critical applications to scale with business requirements.

vSAN Max, powered by vSAN Express Storage Architecture, is a new offering in the vSAN family that will enable an optional deployment model that provides partitioned storage supporting data volumes of up to more than 8.5 petabytes per cluster for vSphere. vSAN Max gives you the ability to scale storage independently of compute, providing an additional level of flexibility to support all workloads. The solution will be licensed separately from existing vSAN editions and will be offered as a subscription and licensed per tebibyte metric.

In addition to vSAN Max, enhancements to the vSAN Express Storage Architecture will provide higher levels of performance, and new vSAN platform functionality will continue to improve day-to-day operations and the user experience.

The introduction of vSAN Max will give customers more options to deploy vSAN by whichever means that maximizes resource utilization and and reduces costs. The solution provides a vSAN cluster for use as shared storage for vSphere clusters built using vSAN ESA, providing new benefits to customers who need the ability to rapidly scale out storage capacity with high levels of performance and resilience. vSAN Max will deliver unprecedented levels of scalability and cost-effectiveness, increasing the value of running storage-intensive workloads on Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) by optimizing resources and reducing total cost of ownership by up to 30%.

By offering both scale out and scale up capabilities, customers will have complete autonomy in how they can increase capacity. vSAN Max nodes will offer up to 7x the density of HCI nodes and will be able to scale out to over 8,5 PB in a cluster. Also it's not just capacity that can be scaled, but also performance: each node added to a vSAN Max cluster will increase the available performance. Because vSAN Max is built on the vSAN Express Storage Architecture, it can handle large data sets and meet stringent performance and resiliency requirements, delivering up to 3.6 million IOPS per storage cluster.

Аs always with vSAN, customers will be able to manage all environments – both the traditional HCI model and the disaggregated model– from a single interface.

As of vSAN 8 Update 2, the new version introduces several enhancements to the core platform that will bring new levels of performance, data durability, and resilience to the Express Storage Architecture. vSAN 8 U2 brings vSAN File Services, giving customers the benefit of the performance and efficiency of vSAN ESA for their environments. All of the features of vSAN File Services on Original Storage Architecture (OSA) in previous versions of vSAN will be extended to vSAN File Services on ESA, such as increased space efficiency, better performance, and smaller failure domains.

vSAN 8 U1 introduced a new adaptive write path in the Express Storage Architecture, which helps to improve performance for write-intensive workloads. This improvement has been added to vSAN 8 U2 disaggregated topologies with vSAN Max. Now, VMs running in a vSphere or vSAN cluster and consuming storage resources from another vSAN ESA cluster or vSAN Max cluster will also be able to take advantage of this feature.

vSAN 8 U2 introduces two new features that will provide much greater flexibility for customers interested in using the vSAN ESA architecture. First is the introduction of the new AF-0 ReadyNode profile, designed for small data centers and edge environments. With lower hardware requirements such as 10Gbps NICs, customers will be able to enjoy the benefits of vSAN ESA for environments that do not require the performance delivered with higher ReadyNode profiles. Second is the introduction of support for “Ready-Intensive” storage devices with lower endurance. These lower endurance devices may be used in many ReadyNode profiles and will offer better value for environments that do not have I/O intensive applications.

It's worth noting that performance, resilience, and flexibility don't matter much if the solution is difficult to operate. vSAN 8 U2 offers several enhancements that simplify administrators' day-to-day operations, streamline problem detection, and accelerate resolution time.

vSAN 8 U1 introduced a new Auto-Policy Management feature that helps administrators configure their new vSAN ESA clusters with optimal levels of resilience and efficiency.

In vSAN 8 U2, this option has become even more effective. Upon the addition or removal of a host from an existing cluster, the Auto-Policy Management feature will evaluate if the optimized default storage policy needs to be adjusted. If vSAN identifies the need to change, it allows for change of the affected storage policy with the simple button, provided in the triggered health finding. At that time, it will reconfigure the cluster-specific default storage policy with the new optimized policy settings.

The new version improves the reporting of capacity overheads for the objects residing on the datastore. This new “ESA object overhead” category found in the “Usage breakdown” section of the cluster capacity dashboard will report the overheads associated with processing and storing data through vSAN ESA’s log-structured filesystem (vSAN LFS). This improvement will help administrators more accurately determine the cost of power consumption in their storage system.

The prescriptive disk claim feature in vSAN ESA will allow administrators to define a standardized disk claiming outcome for the hosts in the cluster. vSAN will then attempt to apply this desired state to all hosts in the cluster. If it fails to apply the configuration, a health finding in Skyline Health for vSAN will be triggered. This new feature builds on vSAN ESA's ability to deliver the highest levels of performance while being easy to use.

To ensure infrastructure security, vSAN 8 U2 will support the use of KMS servers that use the “key expiration” attribute to assign an expiration date for the Key Encryption Key. An integration with Skyline Health for vSAN will run a health finding report as KEK expirations approach, making management simple.

The Top Contributors view, introduced in vSAN 7 U2, provides an easy way to determine the VMs that create the most demand for the resources provided by the cluster. In vSAN 8 U2, this tool is even more powerful, helping customers to find performance hotspots not only for any given point in time, but also customizable periods of time. Administrators will also now be able to move elements in the same performance view - whether it be IOPS, throughput, or latency — enabling them to quickly evaluate the VMs placing the most demand on the cluster and determine if some cluster host resources are consuming resources disproportionately. The new view makes it much easier to troubleshoot performance issues.

Another tool improved in vSAN 8 U2 is vSAN I/O Trip Analyzer. It now has the new capability to analyze workloads running on a stretched (geographically divided between two data centers) vSAN cluster. The user will be able to easily identify where the main source of latency is occurring in such a cluster, as well as latencies in other parts of the stack that may be contributing to the overall latency of the VM.

vSAN 8 U2 also greatly simplifies the setup of stretched clusters and 2-node topologies. Customers will be able to tag vSAN Witness traffic in the Witness Appliance through the VMkernel configuration settings, eliminating the task of tagging Witness host appliance traffic through command line. The size of the Witness Appliance available for vSAN ESA in vSAN 8 U2 has also been expanded. In addition to the "large" size, customers using these configurations will also be able to select the "medium" size, which consumes 2 vCPUs and 16 GB of RAM and will support up to 500 VMs.

For more detailed information about purchasing VMware vSAN 8 Update 2 and vSAN Max please contact vmware@muk.group.