If you’re a vSAN Fan, you’re probably familiar with our Tech Zone resource. Tech Zone is the home for technical guidance on the core technologies that provide modern cloud infrastructure. And if you’re a frequent reader, you’re up to speed with our regular posts on new product features, how-tos and other helpful tidbits for maximizing VMware technologies. But if you’ve missed any of our recent updates, see our newest vSAN Tech Zone blog updates below.
- Capacity Overheads for the ESA in vSAN 8
Express Storage Architecture (ESA) in vSAN 8 is the next generation of hyperconverged infrastructure software from VMware. It enables extraordinary new levels of performance and resource efficiency by processing and storing data faster than ever before, all while using minimal resources. The question does come up: “How much capacity will be used for overheads in the vSAN ESA?
We’ve got you covered with our post that describes ESA capacity overhead rates, replete with examples and plenty of helpful information.
- Stripe Width Storage Policy Rule in the vSAN ESA
vSAN Express Storage Architecture introduces new capabilities that may change how certain policy rules and data placement schemes impact an environment. One rule that customers ask about is the number of disk stripes per object, and with good reason. The rule has a different effect with vSAN ESA than it did with the vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA). What’s changed with the introduction of ESA?
Take a look at the Tech Zone blog post about storage width stripe size, the rule’s impact on your storage and anything else you could ever ask about stripe width policy rules in ESA.
- Design and Sizing for vSAN ESA Clusters
ESA features are a common thread tying together many recent updates. Its improvements take vSAN functionality over the top, making it as efficient as ever. With those improvements include design changes that users must acquaint themselves with. So how do you design and size clusters now that ESA is the name of the game?
Get everything you need to know in this blog post to learn all about designing and sizing ESA storage clusters.
- Using the vSAN ESA in a Stretched Cluster Topology
Do you have stretched clusters on your mind? If so, we’ve gathered all the relevant information for you to digest. Our European customers in particular use lots of stretched clusters to enable geographically-dispersed operations. We introduced ESA to vSAN 8 to improve performance, though many who use stretched clusters are likely wondering about whether that performance carries over to the popular stretched topology. Wonder no further.
This Tech Zone blog describes how to use stretched clusters using vSAN ESA. Spoiler: the efficiency remains high even over long distances.
- Upgrading from VMware vSAN 7 to vSAN 8
Plenty of information new to the Tech Zone blog deals with vSAN 8 and what it allows customers to do. But that doesn’t mean everyone using vSAN 7 has upgraded to the latest version. If you’re considering upgrading or have decided to make the switch, you’ll need to consider a few aspects before upgrading. To start, you’ll need to stand up a new vSAN 8 ESA cluster separately from your vSAN 7 cluster and move the data.
Want to learn more about the migration to vSAN ESA? This blog post about vSAN 8 upgrades has you covered.
- Using Tag-Based SPBM Policies to Manage Your Storage
In the stripe width size blog, policy and rules take center stage. The eponymously named storage policy-based management (SPBM) policies allow users granular control over their datastores, whether vSAN or vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols). These policies allow admins to leverage information from the storage provider when defining host-based data services.
Take this ode to tag-based SPBM policies for managing storage. It’s a modern paean to customizable policies and it’s sure to delight.
- HCI Mesh Scalability Improvements in vSAN 8
Sometimes, it’s the not-so-obvious improvements that make the biggest impact. That might just be the case with new scalability limits within vSAN HCI Mesh. HCI Mesh decouples storage from compute to more appropriately allocate resources. The mesh operates within connectivity limits that moderate resource usage. We’ve increased the cluster connection from five to 10, a subtle but crucial change. The additional connection space improves the ability to augment capacity needs from smaller vSAN clusters, and more opportunities to use stranded capacity from other vSAN clusters.
It’s a small change that allows for large-scale… scaling. Read more about why vSAN 8 continues to push the limits of storage possibilities.
Stay Up to Date With vSAN Tech Zone
While these posts represent some of the most impactful deep dives into the updates, they’re certainly not the only topics making rounds on Tech Zone. Keep up on how to continue improving your storage experience with the Tech Zone blog.
You can also learn more about VMware’s storage solutions, below:
