VMware is pleased to announce that vSAN, the only vSphere-native storage software, is a finalist in Storage Magazine’s Product of the Year competition for the newly created Hyper-converged and composable infrastructure category. We believe vSAN was chosen in part because of our significant investments in supporting cloud-native applications, enhancing vSAN performance and intelligent operations. According to TechTarget, the criteria to be considered a finalist this year expanded, and it includes the following requirements:
- Innovation: Does the product introduce new capabilities or provide such significant improvements to standard capabilities to the degree that it stands out within its product category?
- Performance: Does the product perform to the degree that it could improve a significant portion of the overall storage operation (e.g., a backup product that can significantly reduce the length of a backup window)?
- Ease of integration into environment: How easily does the product integrate with other products — both from the same vendor and others? Has the product been certified by a significant number of major IT vendors?
- Ease of use and manageability: Is the product easy to install? Are the product’s interfaces intuitive? Are the product’s functions clear, easy to learn and to run? Is the product likely to require the help of professional services on an ongoing basis?
- Functionality: Does the product provide greater or more useful functionality than others in its category?
- Value: Does the product represent a cost-effective solution? Can the ROI be easily justified?
We believe vSAN’s innovations enable it to meet the criteria. Let’s review the advancements in 2019 that made the nomination possible.
Unified Management for Today and Tomorrow’s Applications
vSAN 6.7 U3 brought tight integration with Kubernetes through the use of a Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver for vSphere. Persistent volumes used by these applications can be easily managed by a vSphere administrator, just as easily as managing a virtual machine’s virtual disks.
vSphere administrators manage a volume, or “first-class” disk (FCD), characteristics to ensure it meets the performance and protection requirements needed by the application.
A single UI keeps management simple, even when vSAN is used by multiple orchestration platforms. Persistent volumes are enumerated just as virtual machine objects are, with the ability to filter based on K8s metadata.
Intelligent Operations for Simplicity & Consistency
vSAN 6.7 U3 improved the tools used to operate and manage vSAN.
It is essential to understand capacity management to properly administer any storage system. vSAN has made some enhancements to help vSAN administrators better handle the task of capacity management.
- Capacity handling improved to allow resyncs depending on the available capacity. In cases where a disk group could become full, resyncs are paused to prevent any VM I/O disruption.
- Administrators could now automate the process of rebalancing data across the cluster. With each customer’s data being unique, the ability to configure a custom rebalancing variance, addresses a more uniform distribution of data across the cluster.
- Policy changes now occur in batches. This ensures that all policy changes complete successfully, and free capacity is not exhausted.
- Performing maintenance or configuration changes while resyncs are occurring could prevent resyncs from completing properly. In vSAN 6.7 U3, the vSphere Client provided a better understanding of how long resyncs from storage policy changes, data rebalancing, and/or some type of failure are going to take to complete.
In addition to capacity management, it is important to understand ongoing and potential operations. vSAN 6.7 U3 provided some pretty significant enhancements to give administrators more choice and flexibility when it comes to maintenance operations, upgrades, or issue resolution.
It is important to know how, or if, maintenance operations will change the conditions of a cluster. Enhanced predictive analysis is now accomplished through a pre-check simulation, helping administrators make more informed decisions when performing maintenance operations.
Enhanced Performance with Intelligent I/O Management
vSAN 6.7 U3 raised the bar from a performance perspective.
vSAN achieved more predictable by destaging data from the write buffer to the capacity tier. This made vSAN more efficient and consistent with increased throughput for sequential writes. The increased consistency in destaging operations resulted in a smaller deviation between high and low latency. This increased throughput also reduced the amount of time necessary for resyncs from repairs and rebuild tasks.
Resyncs were further enhanced by resyncing even more data in parallel when there are resources available. Adaptive Resync introduced in vSAN 6.7 ensures that virtual machine object I/O maintains an appropriate priority.
The increased throughput, more consistent performance, and faster resyncs are just a few examples of how the vSAN 6.7 U3 delivers the best possible stability and performance.
Next Steps
Learn more about vSAN 6.7 Update 3, the latest vSAN release
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