Today we are officially announcing the launch of VMware Virtual SAN 6.1. Virtual SAN is VMware’s software-defined solution for hyper-converged infrastructure that is targeted towards vSphere administrators.
Now in its 3rd release, Virtual SAN has been adopted by a large number of VMware customers in just 15 months. Customers of all industries and sizes trust Virtual SAN to run their most mission critical applications. Virtual SAN 6.1 adds greater abilities around availability and management that can perform in the most demanding storage environments. In this new release, VMware continues to focus on delivering high performance and increased scale to provide enterprise-class storage for virtualized workloads, including Tier-1 production and business-critical applications.
VMware is expanding the capabilities of Virtual SAN as a platform and is introducing higher levels of enterprise availability and data protection by enhancing replication capabilities of the solution as well as providing fault tolerance support for multi-processors virtual machines. A critical aspect of Virtual SAN is ensuring that data is never lost. Virtual SAN 6.1 stretched clusters further enable the ability for no interruption in operations even in the event of a complete site failure. The most significant new features and capabilities of Virtual SAN 6.1 are described below:
- Virtual SAN Stretched Cluster – Virtual SAN 6.1 allows the ability to create a stretched cluster between two or more geographically separated sites, synchronously replicating data between sites.
- Virtual SAN for Remote Office / Branch Office (ROBO) – Virtual SAN 6.1 provides the ability and support to deploy Virtual SAN clusters for ROBO scenarios. Customers can now deploy large numbers of 2-node Virtual SAN clusters that can be centrally managed from a centralized data center through an individual vCenter Server instance.
- Virtual SAN Replication with vSphere Replication – Virtual SAN 6.1 utilizes vSphere Replication for its replication data services. vSphere Replication with Virtual SAN supports RPOs from 5 minutes to 24 hours. VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) can be used as part of the solution in order to deliver a fully orchestrated disaster recovery solution.
- Support for Multi-Processor Fault Tolerance (SMP-FT) – Virtual SAN 6.1 is now able to support vSphere Fault Tolerance and provide continuous availability with zero downtime for mission critical applications in the event of hardware failure.
- Support for Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) – Virtual SAN 6.1 now supports clustering technologies from both Oracle and Microsoft. With Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) customers can run multiple Oracle RDBMS instances accessing the Virtual SAN datastore, delivering better performance, scalability and resilience. Similarly, with Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC)) failover clustering functionality is enabled, and can guard against application and service failures.
- Maximum Performance and Low latencies – VMware continues the performance improvement of Virtual SAN by expanding the support of new types of hardware devices and interfaces.
- ULLtra DIMM™ – ULLtraDIMM SSDs connect flash storage to the memory channel via DIMM slots, achieving very low (<5us) write latency. Ultra DIMM provides even greater density and performance – for example, it allows for a 12-TB All Flash Virtual SAN host in a thin blade form factor, as well as 3x improvement in latency compared to external arrays.
- NVMe – Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is a new communications interface developed especially for SSDs allowing for greater parallelism to be utilized by both hardware and software and as a result various performance improvements. Leveraging NVMe in a Virtual SAN all flash deployment resulted in 3.2M IOPS measured on a 32-node cluster – ~100K IOPS/Host.
- Virtual SAN Health Check-Plug-in – is a vCenter Server plug-in for the vSphere Web Client that is designed to provide and centralized health reporting solution that checks all aspects of the Virtual SAN configuration and health of hardware, data and its limits.
- Virtual SAN Management Pack for vRealize Operations – Virtual SAN’s 6.1 new integration with vRealize operations delivers a comprehensive set of features to help manage Virtual SAN with global data visualization.
There is a lot whole lot more to come folks so tighten your seat belts! For more information visit the VMware Virtual SAN Product page.
The next step is try it yourself! The Virtual SAN Hands-on-Labs gives you an opportunity to experiment with many of the key features of Virtual SAN. To find out where VSAN would fit in your environment, sign up for a VSAN Assessment. This free, one-week analysis can reveal where Virtual SAN can reduce cost, eliminate complexity, and increase your agility. Sign up today!
– Enjoy
For future updates on Virtual SAN (VSAN), vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVol) and other Storage and Availability technologies, as well as vSphere Integrated OpenStack (VIO), and Cloud-Native Apps (CNA) be sure to follow me on Twitter: @PunchingClouds
