vSAN 6.6 is here!
Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of vSAN 6.6. vSAN 6.6 accelerates the modernization of data center infrastructure with improved security, lower cost, and faster performance. vSAN 6.6 provides native software-based vSAN Encryption, local failure protection with stretched clusters, cost savings with ease of management and up to 50% higher performance for both read and write intensive applications.
Here are the key features and benefits for this release:
Evolve without risk with native security and availability
- vSAN 6.6 delivers the first software-defined, hardware-agnostic, data-at-rest encryption solution for HCI that works seamlessly with vSAN’s storage efficiency features, such as deduplication and compression. By eliminating the need for specialized SED drives and IO controllers, vSAN 6.6 allows customers to rely on common external key management across any server today and into the public cloud tomorrow.
- Rebuild is further optimized including partial rebuilds to improve availability
- Proactive evacuation of data from degraded storage devices before they fail helps lower the risk of hardware failures
- New Resilient management through vSphere Host Client helps cluster management even when vCenter Server is unavailable.
Lower TCO with efficiency at scale and intelligent operations
- vSAN 6.6 now supports highly-available stretched clusters that support local failure protection for resiliency against both site failures and local component failures.
- vSAN Easy Install speeds initial cluster setup by introducing 1-click setting of networking and cluster configuration options.
- vSAN Config Assist (also referred to as Auto Config) provides 1-click hardware lifecycle management to update the controller hardware’s firmware and driver.
- New health checks for encryption, networking, iSCSI, resync operations helps simplify management and accelerate troubleshooting.
- vSAN Cloud Analytics is introduced to provide proactive support and recommendations through analysis of specific customer environments
Scale to tomorrow with optimized performance for expanded use cases
- Up to 50% greater All-Flash performance versus previous vSAN editions
- Day 1 support for Intel Optane NVMe SSDs – another industry first for HCI
- New reference architectures for next-generation applications like Big Data, Splunk and InterSystems Cache database
Things to Note
IMPORTANT: The underlying release for vSAN 6.6 is vSphere 6.5.0d – a patch release for vSphere 6.5. For existing vSAN users upgrading to vSAN 6.6, please consult VMware Product Interoperability Matrices to ensure upgrade from your current vSAN version is supported.
Please note that for vSAN users currently on 6.0 Update 3 – upgrade to vSAN 6.6 is NOT yet supported. This is in conformance to vSphere upgrade policies noted here https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2149713.
The parent release of vSAN 6.6 is vSphere 6.5 and as shown by VMware Product Interoperability Matrices, an upgrade from 6.0 U3 to vSphere 6.5 (and hence vSAN 6.5) is NOT supported. Please refer to this KB Supported Upgrade Paths for vSAN 6.6 for further details.
For more details on the release please refer to the What’s New in vSAN 6.6
Here are a few important pointers for vSAN and vSAN 6.6:
- Read about vSAN in the vSAN Product Page
- vSAN 6.6 Product Download page
- vSAN 6.6 Release Notes
