vSAN 6.7 Update 3 Integrates Cloud-Native Application Storage Support and More!
We’re excited to announce the upcoming release of the industry-leading hyperconverged infrastructure software, VMware vSAN. As applications continue to evolve, the infrastructure needs to be flexible enough to support those changes, and 6.7 Update 3 provides new capabilities to help administrators manage cloud-native applications on the same infrastructure as their traditional applications.
New Applications Require A Different Infrastructure Approach
In order to accommodate the demand for new services, organizations have started to shift from traditional, monolithic applications to microservices-based applications. Microservices provide application developers:
- Resource-efficient scalability
- Faster time to market and
- Cost less to build and maintain
However, microservices come with their own challenges: microservices-based applications pull much of the complexity out of the application and place it on other systems. New tools, such as orchestrators, are required to handle the complexity of deploying hundreds or thousands of microservices that replace traditional applications.
Containers, the predominant deployment method for microservices, were originally designed for stateless applications, and that was their first great use case. However, as almost all applications require storage persistence, container orchestration vendors developed storage persistence capabilities to support more use cases. As organizations have continued to evolve capabilities by adopting new applications, such as NoSQL databases, and convert legacy applications to microservices, containers have been increasingly used for stateful technologies.
Developers and administrators need a persistent storage solution that integrates with Kubernetes and provides additional capabilities, including full data services to container volumes. Administrators want to use the same tools they currently use for VMs to manage container volumes. As container images can scale rapidly and be scheduled to run anywhere, they need a storage infrastructure that can scale on-demand with containers and be portable across not only a cluster but across data centers and clouds. Administrators want to provide developers simple, self-service storage classes that offer a variety of availability and performance options to address most needs.
VMware vSAN Recognized as “Ultimate Solution” for Cloud-Native Applications by DataStax
Earlier this year, VMware was recognized as Partner of the Year by DataStax due to VMware’s ability to provide unified infrastructure management across clouds, which accelerates customers’ DataStax deployments while empowering IT to run at peak efficiency managing multi-cloud deployments.
“VMware hyperconverged Infrastructure, VMware Cloud, and DataStax Enterprise provide an ultimate solution to run next-generation applications delivering a uniform deployment and management experience across clouds,” said Kathryn Erickson, Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at DataStax. “Keeping developers and architects in mind, this solution provides highly available data and infrastructure with the ability to rapidly scale resources in development and production environments across availability zones, regions, and data centers.”
Key benefits of running cloud-native applications on vSAN include:
- Operational Simplicity – Storage management is unified under a single stack, with VMware tools, eliminating silos and delivering cost savings
- Enhanced Agility – customers can deploy DSE quickly from vSAN’s highly-automated, policy-based management in production environments on a proven storage platform
- Increased Deployment Flexibility and Choice – Customers can scale-out by adding nodes, or scale-up their clusters by adding CPU, DRAM and disk capacity. Day zero support of the latest storage technologies provides organizations to non-disruptively add capabilities, such as NVMe, to a cluster
vSAN 6.7 Update 3 Delivers Container-Ready Infrastructure
We are now introducing vSAN 6.7 Update 3, to enable customers with container-ready infrastructure that can deliver high velocity scaling, multi-cloud portability and unified management. With vSAN 6.7 Update 3, IT can unify their virtual machine and container-based compute and storage management using familiar tools and processes, reducing time to remediate storage issues. vSAN 6.7 Update 3 scales at the pace of containers, and it provides developers seamless access to infrastructure. As VMware provides consistent infrastructure operations from the core data center to public cloud, workloads and their data can easily migrate across clouds.
vSAN Scales at the Pace of Containers
Developers leveraging containers don’t want to worry about infrastructure; they just want it to scale on demand. While developers leveraging public cloud don’t face scalability concerns, on-prem deployments face significant bottlenecks. Bare metal deployments lack basic tools for lifecycle management, monitoring and create another infrastructure silo. Existing external storage arrays can’t scale as effectively with containers due to lack of policy-based management and require separate management tools from compute resources.
With vSAN, developers can seamlessly consume storage. vSAN cloud native storage supports all key storage API objects within Kubernetes. With minimal effort, developers can choose a policy-driven storage class for their pods and automatically mount the volume. While container persistent storage works with any vSphere datastore, SPBM –driven storage with vSAN and Virtual Volumes have two key advantages over VMFS:
- API driven provisioning to scale at the pace of containers
- Hybrid cloud portable due to consistent infrastructure and operations
The bottom line is your infrastructure can gain the agility it needs to keep pace with container-based development, simplifying adoption of this emerging technology.
vSAN is Hybrid Cloud Ready
Docker containers, released in 2013, changed the value proposition for containers. With a “build once, run anywhere” capability, developers can deploy on their laptops and then migrate them to a production environment on-prem or to a public cloud provider with minimal effort. However, stateful technologies need data to easily migrate between environments, and admins want familiar tools and processes to manage a multi-cloud environment.
With vSAN, admins can use the same infrastructure, tools and processes to manage their public and private cloud environments; vSAN has native services with hundreds of public cloud providers, including the four largest public cloud providers: Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM. As these environments leverage the same tools and processes as users’ private clouds, data migration is as simple, and Kubernetes can leverage your public cloud environment as your container environment scales.
vSAN Provides Unified Management for Containers and Virtual Machines
In order to run containerized applications efficiently, organizations need to run them on the same infrastructure used for traditional applications. However, admins can’t granularly manage container volumes today; there could be dozens or hundreds of containers within a single VM. If a health issue arises with a specific container volume, admins don’t have the granular view to troubleshoot and remediate the issue. Instead, developers and administrator must go through a lengthy, highly manual process to identify the source of the problem.
Admins gain granular visibility into container volumes, empowering the administrator to quickly and easily control, monitor health and compliance information on a container volume basis. Admins will be able to rapidly troubleshoot and remediate activities; this faster support will help DevOps teams implement their container-based apps even faster.
vSAN Offers Enterprise Plus Edition with Self Driving Operations
VMware is also announcing the upcoming release of vSAN Enterprise Plus Edition, a bundle of vSAN Enterprise and vRealize Operations Advanced licenses. Organizations receive the following key benefits from adopting this version of vSAN:
- Stretched clusters with local protection – Create a robust stretched cluster with site and local protection between two geographically separate sites, synchronously replicating data between sites. It enables enterprise-level availability for 50 percent lower costs than the leading traditional solution.
- vSAN Encryption – Native to vSAN, vSAN Encryption provides data-at-rest security at the cluster level and supports all vSAN features, including space efficiency features like deduplication and compression. Enabled with a few clicks, vSAN Encryption is built for compliance requirements and offers simple key management with support for all KMIP compliant key managers, such as CloudLink, Hytrust, SafeNet, Thales, and Vormetric. vSAN Encryption is FIPS 140-2 validated, meeting stringent U.S. federal government standards.
- Continuous performance optimization – Enable performance at minimal cost, driven by operational and business intent with predictive analytics driving actions to automatically balance workloads and proactively avoid contention.
- Efficient capacity management and planning – Reduce cost and capacity risk with real-time, predictive capacity analytics, delivering optimal densification and proactive planning. Predict future demand, get actionable recommendations, and automate reclamation and right-sizing.
- Intelligent remediation – Predict, prevent, and troubleshoot faster with actionable insights correlating metrics and logs, and unified observability from applications to infrastructure. Centralize IT operations management with native SDDC integrations, federated views, and a highly scalable and extensible platform.
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