Today we’re announcing the Initial Availability of vSphere 8 Update 2, and it is available for download. vSphere 8 Update 2 has some significant features, enhancements, and improvements. Most notably, vSAN 8 Update 2 provides the underpinnings for VMware vSAN MaxTM, VMware’s new disaggregated storage solution based on vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA). (Note: We will provide an update on vSAN Max’s availability in the second half of VMware’s Fiscal Year 24. vSAN Max is a new offering in the vSAN family). Capable of petabyte scale, vSAN Max will provide customers with more scale-out and scale-up solutions when deploying vSAN in their environment.
Additional enhancements for vSAN in vSphere 8 Update 2:
- Integrated File Services for Cloud Native and Traditional Workloads.
- Improved Performance for Disaggregated Environments.
- New AF-0 ReadyNode profile for small deployments.
- Default Auto-Policy Intelligence for optimal vSAN SPBM policies.
- Improved Clarity with Cluster Capacity Reporting.
- Improved Security Through Enhanced Key Management.
- Intuitive Detection of VMs and Disks Consuming the Most Resources.
- Improved Detection of Performance Bottleneck in Stretched Clusters.
- Simplified configuration for 2-Node and Stretched Clusters.
For more information on all the enhancements, see the vSAN 8 U2 announcement blog here
vVols and Core Storage
In addition to the vSAN announcements, there are also some important vVols and Core Storage enhancements. The most significant announcement is the ability to hot extend shared disks on vVols! This enables customers using clustered applications like Microsoft WSFC or Oracle RAC to expand the shared disks without having to shut down the application. This was the last feature RDMs had over vVols. Customers can now migrate the clustered applications to vVols and reduce the operational overhead associated with RDMs. Online Shared Disk Extension with vVols | VMware
Additional vVols and Core Storage Enhancements.
- vVols NVMe in-band migration
- Automated recovery from PDL for vVol PEs
- Support for vVols Online Disk Extension with Oracle RAC
- UNMAP Support for config-vVol
- Support vNVME controller type for MS WSFC
- Support Oracle RAC clustering with vVols NVMe (FC, TCP)
- Enable vNVMe support with Oracle RAC (vVols)
- Improved SE Sparse snapshot offline consolidation performance.
- DNLC cache for NFS4.1
- NFS nConnect
For more information on all the enhancements, see the vSphere 8 U2 vVols and Core Storage article here.
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