VMWARE VSAN 7 RELEASE
VMware VSAN (also known as Virtual SAN) is a software-defined SAN (storage) product developed by VMware. It is very similar in many ways to SAN (Storage area network). It is a virtual storage appliance which allows a group of VMs or virtual machines to share a common storage device. The SAN is configured and managed on the same level as your VMs (virtualized) and is not a dedicated physical machine.
vSAN integration for VCF that provides the best-in-class platform for running any workload on-premises or in the cloud. VMware on AWS.VMware VSAN is a hardware-based hyper, software define solution that combines storage virtualization with a virtual application and network. VSAN also incorporates a storage engine, which is an appliance that manages all the logical and physical aspects of a VSAN. VMware VSAN can be applied to both SAN-based and stand-alone virtual machines.
vSphere Lifecycle Manager
All hosts hardware software firmware can be manage with central vSphere Lifecycle Manager(vLCM). With the newest capacities of vSphere Lifecycle Manager, enhanced features a single-pane-of-glass administration which enables care of upgrades maybe not just to get vSphere also for firmware such as bios, BMC, boot drive, disk, HBA as well as also different vendor-related upgrades.
Increase reliability and reduce number of tools for managing infra.
Native Files Services
This can be in use for both SAN and NAS
In this release, The file services is now fully integrated in vsphere and can be use with cluster services such as de-duplication and compression and encryption from web console. We’ve expanded the protocols that are supported to add SMB Version 3.1.1 (Server Message Block) network protocol together with NFS. VSAN is now able to present documents shares which support NFS v3 and v4.1, in addition to SMB v2.1 and v3. Currently, vSAN File Services supports NFS v4.1 and v3 and is suited and developed for both traditional and cloud-native workloads.
Enhanced Cloud-Native Storage
VSAN vendors are typically based on the principle of “the cheaper the price, the lower the cost per unit”. Because VSAN is so easy to set up, even people who are not IT experts can install VSAN and deploy virtualized infrastructure in a short period of time. Even non-technical people can manage VSAN in a day or two because VSAN allows a user to manage VSAN just like he would manage any other application.
- vSAN 6.7 Update 3 first introduced the ability to provision block-based persistent volumes to containers, Kubernetes. Etc.
- vSAN 7 extends this capability and enables administrators to provision container file-based persistent volumes to Kubernetes workloads.
- Expanded data services enabling more use cases
- Supports both Encryption and snapshots.
One of the great benefits of VSAN is that it is completely customizable. You can choose your storage system and storage policies for each VSAN and then configure your VSAN according to the requirements and budget. And VSAN is highly scalable, which means that you can scale the number of physical servers to increase the amount of storage you have.
New features and enhancements from VMware official site :
- Native support for NVMe hot plug:- Support all next generation NVMe drives
- Remove EZT for shared disk :- vSAN 7.0 eliminates the prerequisite that shared virtual disks using the multi-writer flag must also use the eager zero thick format.
- Support for large capacity drives up to 32 TB physical capacity of drive and logical 1 PB when with advanced features such as deduplication and compression is enabled.
- vVol support for modern applications :- vSphere now enables unified management for Persistent Volumes across vSAN, NFS, VMFS and vVols.
- Additionally, Faster vSAN host restarts, Workload I/O analysis, Consolidated I/O performance view, Virtual Machine latency monitoring with IOPS limits, Secure drive erase, VPAT section 508 compliant
- Data migration precheck for disks
Reference