Virtual SAN 6 – you heard about it in February… thousands of you read about it in Rawlinson’s blog post… and today you can get your hands on it. Virtual SAN 6 is now generally available (GA) – download your evaluation version today! For those of you who missed Rawlinson’s blog post describing the details around what’s new with Virtual SAN 6 – you can read it here (below). But there’s a better way to get the information – register and attend this week’s webinar on “What’s New with Virtual SAN 6” hosted by Rawlinson Rivera – we’ll see you there!
It is with great pleasure and joy that I like to announce the official launch of VMware Virtual SAN 6.0, one of VMware’s most innovative software-defined storage products and the best hypervisor-converged storage platform for virtual machines. Virtual SAN 6.0 delivers a vast variety of enhancements, new features to the as well as performance and scalability improvements.
Virtual SAN 6.0 introduces support for an all-flash architecture specially designed to provide virtualized applications high performance with predictably low latencies. Now with support for both hybrid and all-flash architectures Virtual SAN 6.0 is ready to meet the performance demands of just about any virtualized application by delivering consistent performance with sub-millisecond latencies.
Hybrid Architecture
In the hybrid architecture, server-attached magnetic disks are pooled to create a distributed shared datastore that persists the data. In this type of architecture, you can get up to 40K IOPS per server host.
All-Flash Architecture
In All-Flash architecture, the flash-based caching tier is intelligently used as a write-buffer only while another set of flash devices forms the persistence tier to store data. Since this architecture utilizes only flash devices, it delivers extremely high IOPs of up to 90K per host, with predictable low latencies.
Virtual SAN 6.0 delivers true enterprise-level scale and performance by doubling the scalability of Virtual SAN 5.5 by scaling up to 64 nodes per cluster for both hybrid and all-flash configurations. In addition, Virtual SAN 6.0 improves the number of virtual machines per host up to 200 for both supported architectures.
The performance enhancements delivered in Virtual SAN 6.0 are partially due to the new Virtual SAN on-disk Filesystem (VSAN FS). The new version delivers a new VMDK delta file (vsanSparse) takes advantage of the new on-disk format writing and extended caching capabilities to deliver efficient performance. This results in the delivery of performance-based snapshots, and clone that are comparable to SAN snapshots.
Virtual SAN 6.0 now enables intelligent placement of virtual machine objects across server racks for enhanced application availability even in case of complete rack failures. Virtual SAN Fault Domains provide the ability to group multiple hosts within a cluster to define failure domains to ensure replicas of virtual machines data is spread across the defined failure domains (racks).
Along with all the new added features a significant amount of improvements have been added to enhance the management user experience:
- Disk/Disk Group Evacuation – Introduce ability to evacuate data from individual disk/disk groups before removing a disk/disk group from the Virtual SAN.
- Disk Serviceability features – easily map the location of magnetic disks and flash devices. Ability light disk LED on failures, Turn disk LED on/off from the vSphere Web Client.
- Storage Consumption Models – adds functionality to visualize Virtual SAN 6.0 datastore resource utilization when a VM Storage Policy is created or edited.
- UI Resynchronization Dashboard – the vSphere Web Client UI displays virtual machine objects resynchronization status and remaining bytes to sync.
- Proactive Rebalance – provides the ability to manually trigger a rebalance operation in order to utilize newly added cluster storage capacity.
- Health Services – deliver troubleshooting and health reports to vSphere Administrators about Virtual SAN 6.0 subsystems and their dependencies such as cluster, network, data, limits, physical disk.
With all the major enhancements and features of this release, Virtual SAN is now enterprise-ready, and customers can use it for a broad range of use cases, including business-critical and tier-1 production applications. Stay tune, there is a lot more to come from the world’s greatest software-defined storage platform. For more information visit the Virtual SAN product page.
– Enjoy
For future updates on Virtual SAN (VSAN), vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) and other Software-defined Storage technologies as well as vSphere + OpenStack be sure to follow me on Twitter: @PunchingClouds
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