Introducing vSAN 8 Update 2 and VMware vSAN Max

We are excited to announce general availability of vSAN 8 Update 2. As of today, October 18, 2023, vSAN 8 Update 2 is available to all customers and partners.

Updates in vSAN 8 U2 will enable vSAN Max’s disaggregated storage.

VMware is announcing the upcoming release of vSAN 8 Update 2 as well as an exciting new capability, VMware vSAN Max^TM
vSAN Max enables a new, disaggregated storage deployment model built on vSAN Express Storage Architecture
Performance improvements of up to 30% can be expected in vSAN 8 U2, through multiple platform enhancements

Continuing the commitment to support customers’ most critical workloads with flexibility, performance, and efficiency, VMware is proud to announce vSAN 8 Update 2 and VMware vSAN Max.

vSAN Max, powered by vSAN Express Storage Architecture, is a new capability that will enable an optional deployment model delivering petabyte-scale disaggregated storage for vSphere. Leveraging vSAN Max, users will be able to scale storage independently from compute for added levels of flexibility to support all of their workloads.

In addition to the new vSAN Max, enhancements across vSAN Express Storage Architecture will deliver new levels of performance, and new functionality in the vSAN platform will continue to improve daily operations and user experience.

Petabyte-scale Disaggregated Storage

Organizations today rely on a variety of applications to run the business, each with unique compute power, storage capacity, and performance needs. Advanced analytics, AI applications, and cloud-native applications are increasingly employed, while relational databases and virtual desktops remain essential. The growing diversity of workloads and their scaling dynamics drive the need for flexible infrastructure that enables these mission-critical applications to scale as the business demands.

With the introduction of vSAN Max, our customers will have greater choice to deploy vSAN by whichever means maximizes resource utilization and lowers their costs.

vSAN Max will give our customers the unique ability to provision a vSAN cluster to be used as shared storage for vSphere clusters. It is built using the vSAN ESA and will introduce new benefits for our customers who desire the ability to rapidly scale out storage capacity with high levels of performance and resilience. vSAN Max will provide unprecedented levels of scalability and cost efficiency, enhancing the value of running storage-intensive workloads on Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) by optimizing resource utilization and lowering TCO by up to 30%.

By offering both scale out and scale up capabilities, customers will have complete autonomy in how they can increase capacity. vSAN Max nodes will offer up to 7x the density of HCI nodes and will be able to scale out to over 8 and a half petabytes in a cluster. Not only will customers have the ability to scale capacity, but they will also be able to scale performance; each node added to a vSAN Max cluster will increase the available performance. And because vSAN Max is built on vSAN Express Storage Architecture, it can accommodate massive data sets and meet stringent performance and resiliency requirements, with up to 3.6 million IOPS per storage cluster.

As always with vSAN, customers will be able to manage all environments – both the traditional HCI model and the disaggregated model– from a single interface.

Highly Performant Platform

vSAN 8 U2 introduces several new enhancements to the core platform that will deliver all new levels of performance, data durability, and resilience in the Express Storage Architecture.

Integrated File Services for Cloud Native and Traditional Workloads

vSAN 8 U2 brings vSAN file services to the Express Storage Architecture. Customers will benefit from the performance and efficiency of vSAN ESA for their environments that use vSAN file services. All the capabilities found in vSAN file services on the original storage architecture (OSA) in previous versions of vSAN will be extended to vSAN file services on the ESA: improved space efficiency; better performance; and smaller failure domains.

Improved Performance for Disaggregated Environments

vSAN 8 U1 introduced a new adaptive write path on the Express Storage Architecture, to help improve performance for workloads that issued a large number of writes or highly sequential writes to write the data in an alternative, optimized way. We’ve brought this enhancement to disaggregated topologies in vSAN 8 U2 with vSAN Max. Now, VMs running on a vSphere or vSAN cluster while consuming the storage resources of another vSAN ESA cluster, or vSAN Max cluster, will be able to take advantage of this capability as well.

Bringing vSAN ESA’s benefits to Small Data Centers and Edge

vSAN 8 U2 introduces two new enhancements that will provide much more flexibility for customers interested in running vSAN ESA. First, is the introduction of a new ReadyNode profile—the AF-0 ReadyNode is designed for small data centers and edge environments. With lower hardware requirements such as 10Gb NICs, this means customers will be able to enjoy the benefits of vSAN ESA for environments that do not demand the performance delivered with higher ReadyNode profiles. Second, is the introduction of support for lower-endurance “Ready-Intensive” storage devices. These lower-endurance devices may be used in many of the ReadyNode profiles and will offer a better price point for environments that may not have I/O intensive applications.

Enhanced Management

Performance, resilience, and flexibility mean less if a solution is not easy to operate. vSAN 8 U2 will offer several new improvements that simplify the day-to-day operations of administrators, streamline issue detection, and accelerate time to resolution.

Default Policy Intelligence makes Optimal Configuration Easier

In vSAN 8 U1 we introduced a new Auto-Policy Management feature that helps administrators configure their new vSAN ESA clusters with optimal levels of resilience and efficiency. In vSAN 8 U2, we’ve made this feature even more capable. Upon the addition or removal of a host from an existing cluster, the Auto-Policy Management feature will evaluate if the optimized default storage policy needs to be adjusted. If vSAN identifies the need to change, it allows for change of the affected storage policy with the simple button, provided in the triggered health finding. At that time, it will reconfigure the cluster-specific default storage policy with the new optimized policy settings.

Improved Clarity with Cluster Capacity Reporting

vSAN 8 U2 improves the reporting of capacity overheads for the objects residing on the datastore. This new “ESA object overhead” category found in the “Usage breakdown” section of the cluster capacity dashboard will report the overheads associated with processing and storing data through vSAN ESA’s log-structured filesystem (vSAN LFS). This improvement will help administrators more accurately determine the capacity consumption overheads with their storage system.

Storage Device Management at Scale

A new vSAN ESA prescriptive disk claim capability will allow administrators to define a standardized disk claiming outcome for the hosts that comprise a cluster. vSAN will then attempt to apply this desired state to all hosts in the cluster. If it can’t apply the configuration, a health finding in Skyline Health for vSAN will be triggered. The new vSAN ESA prescriptive disk claim feature builds on vSAN ESA’s ability to deliver supreme levels of performance while being simple to use.

Improved Security Through Enhanced Key Management

As the security capabilities of an infrastructure continue to become more sophisticated, vSAN continues to adapt to support these new capabilities. To this end, vSAN 8 U2 will support the use of KMS servers that use a “key expiration” attribute for assigning an expiration date to a Key Encryption Key (KEK). An integration with Skyline Health for vSAN will trigger a health finding report as KEK expirations approach, making management simple.

Intuitive Detection of VMs and Disks Consuming the most Resources

The Top Contributors view, introduced in vSAN 7 U2, provides an easy way to determine the VMs that contribute to the most demand on the resources provided by the cluster. In vSAN 8 U2, we’ve made the tool even greater, helping customers find performance hotspots not only for any given point in time, but over customizable periods of time. Admins will also now have the ability to transpose other top contributors in the same performance view — whether it be IOPS, throughput, or latency — enabling them to quickly evaluate the VMs placing the most demand on the cluster and determine if some cluster host resources are disproportionally consuming resources. The new view will greatly simplify troubleshooting performance issues.

Improved Detection of Performance Bottleneck in Stretched Clusters

The vSAN I/O Trip Analyzer is another tool enhanced in vSAN 8 U2, with the new capability to perform an analysis on workloads running in a vSAN stretched cluster. A user will easily be able to determine where the primary source of latency is occurring in a vSAN stretched cluster, as well as latencies in other parts of the stack that may be contributing to the overall latency seen by the VM.

Easier Configuration for 2-Node and Stretched Clusters

vSAN 8 U2 makes configuration of stretched clusters and 2-node topologies easier. Customers will be able to tag vSAN witness traffic in the witness host appliance through the VMkernel configuration settings, removing the task of tagging witness host appliance traffic through command line. We’ve also expanded the sizes of witness host appliance available for vSAN ESA in vSAN 8 U2. In addition to the “large” sized witness host appliance, customers running these configurations will also be able to choose a “medium” sized witness host appliance, which consumes 2vCPUs and 16GB of RAM, and will support 500 VMs.