One of the more exciting announcements at VMworld 2018 was a preview of VMware vSAN utilizing Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) with VMware Cloud on AWS. This service is called Elastic vSAN and is soon available. Elastic vSAN runs on new Amazon EC2 R5.metal instances to augment existing SDDC for storage-dense environments. Storage per host ranges from 15 to 35 TB in increments of 5 TB. The user chooses the amount of storage desired and used on all hosts within the cluster. R5.metal clusters can also be added to an existing SDDC with at least one existing provisioned cluster.
This week on the Virtually Speaking Podcast we welcome VMware’s Glenn Sizemore to walk us through the details of this new service. Elastic vSAN has effectively solved the data gravity challenge inside VMware Cloud on AWS. More importantly, it provides an architecture to deliver future capabilities via software; composing the underlying hardware as required based on current capabilities.
Episode Timeline
- 3:46 What is VMware Cloud on AWS?
- 4:49 Single Host vSAN
- 7:46 How does VMC handle Failure Scenarios?
- 14:06 Unified operations with VMC and vSAN Core-Edge-Cloud
- 15:08 What about an Amazon Availability Zone (AZ) failure? (stretched Clusters)
- 17:23 Cost of ownership conversation
- 20:24 Elastic vSAN
- 30:21 How does this affect customers who aren’t using VMC?
- 32:35 VMware Cloud on AWS Roadmap
Links Mentioned
- General Info: https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws/faq#general
- Public Roadmap: https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws/roadmap
- VMworld Preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQtO4RXBg8c
- Blog Posts:
- Introducing Elastic vSAN
- VMware Cloud on AWS Compliance ready Data-at-Rest Encryption
- Measuring Performance in VMware Cloud on AWS
- Deploying the vSAN Witness Appliance within VMware Cloud on AWS
- vSAN Witness Appliance in VMware Cloud on AWS
- Single Host vSAN
- Understanding the vSAN Witness Host
- Relentless Availability powered by vSAN Stretched Clusters for VMware Cloud on AWS
- SPBM, because not all applications are created equal
- Videos:
The Virtually Speaking Podcast
The Virtually Speaking Podcast is a weekly technical podcast dedicated to discussing VMware topics related to storage and availability. Each week Pete Flecha and John Nicholson bring in various subject matter experts from VMware and within the industry to discuss their respective areas of expertise. If you’re new to the Virtually Speaking Podcast check out all episodes on vSpeakingPodcast.com and follow on twitter @VirtSpeaking.
