VMware, the leader in virtualization, has introduced VMware vSAN Max as the latest addition to their vSAN product lineup. This hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution offers maximum performance, scalability, and flexibility for modern data centers. The new Express Storage Architecture (ESA) in vSAN 8 significantly improves the performance and architecture of the VMware vSAN family, enabling vSAN Max to leverage advanced features and capabilities.
vSAN Max: The Most Powerful vSAN
One of the most exciting introductions in vSAN 8 Update 2 is the availability of the new vSAN Max offering with its impressive features. The name vSAN Max suggests that it is a software technology stack built on the vSAN Express Storage Architecture in ESXi. It overcomes the limitations of traditional storage methods by offering disaggregation of storage and compute resources. With vSAN Max, organizations can scale storage independently and even overcome the limitations of existing vSAN editions. This advancement marks a significant step forward in the industry.
Petabyte-Scale (PB) Disaggregated Storage for vSphere
vSAN Max provides petabyte-scale disaggregated storage for vSphere environments. It enables the provisioning of a vSAN cluster that serves as shared storage for vSphere clusters. With vSAN Max, companies no longer have to provide and maintain separate storage arrays, controllers, and traditional architectures. This approach offers scalability and cost efficiency, combining the convenience of a three-tier architecture with the simplicity of vSAN.
Scaling Storage with vSAN Max
The introduction of vSAN Max brings scale-out storage capabilities, a feature not available in many dedicated storage solutions. Users can now scale out storage one server at a time, improving capacity and performance in a manageable and budget-friendly way. This approach helps reduce storage costs as storage needs change, making it a cost-effective solution.
Unified Management Interface
One of the key features of vSAN Max is its unified single interface for management. It seamlessly integrates with existing vSAN clusters, allowing users to manage their storage with the same ease and familiarity as other vSAN components. This feature simplifies the management of storage resources, ensuring a consistent user experience.
vSAN Max: Addressing Diverse Use Cases
While the traditional HCI model of vSAN has been successful, vSAN Max extends this success by addressing specific use cases. It is particularly well-suited for providing centralized shared storage for entire environments. Customers heavily invested in blades can take advantage of vSAN Max, which offers an optimal solution for constructing vSphere clusters in a more strategic and cost-effective manner. With its flexibility and performance, vSAN Max caters to a wide range of use cases.
Architecture of vSAN Max
At its core, vSAN Max comprises a cluster of vSAN hosts dedicated to providing shared storage to other clusters. It is different from the traditional vSAN HCI model as it focuses exclusively on storage, without hosting any VM instances. This specialization allows vSAN Max to serve as primary storage for vSphere clusters or add storage for vSphere and other vSAN clusters. The flexibility it offers enables easy integration between traditional and disaggregated HCI environments.
Leveraging the vSAN Express Storage Architecture
vSAN Max is built upon the vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) foundation. This architecture brings new levels of performance and efficiency to storage solutions. With vSAN Max, customers can flexibly consume storage resources and benefit from improved storage performance and efficiency.
Configuring vSAN Max Clusters
The process of configuring a vSAN Max cluster is streamlined and intuitive. Administrators can choose between a traditional aggregated vSAN HCI cluster, a vSAN Max cluster, or a vSphere cluster using remote vSAN-powered storage. Furthermore, vSAN Max can be configured as either a single-site cluster or a stretched cluster to provide resilient remote storage across two sites. The provisioning of vSAN Max is made simple through well-designed configuration processes.
Auto Policy Management in vSAN Max
The Auto Policy Management feature in vSAN Max simplifies storage management by automatically determining the optimal default storage policy based on cluster size.
This feature allows for the provisioning of virtual machines, ensuring they are configured for optimal resilience without requiring manual intervention.
Integrating vSAN Max with Traditional vSphere Clusters
Integrating vSAN Max storage resources with traditional vSphere clusters is straightforward. The remote datastore can be easily mounted at the cluster level, making the storage immediately ready for use. This integration exemplifies the flexibility and ease of operation that vSAN Max offers.
Ongoing Operations and Management
Ongoing operations of a vSAN Max cluster are as easy as the initial setup. Administrators can rely on vCenter Server, which provides a comprehensive dashboard displaying critical information, performance metrics, and capacity details. The management interface simplifies monitoring and operations, ensuring smooth day-to-day management of the cluster.
Enhanced Adaptive Write Path in Disaggregated Environments
vSAN 8 Update 2 enhances the Express Storage Architecture (ESA) with an improved Adaptive Write Path. This enhancement significantly boosts throughput and reduces latency in real-time without requiring administrator intervention. With increased performance, vSAN Max demonstrates its capabilities in disaggregated environments.
Increased VM Density and Efficiency
vSAN 8 Update 2 further improves the efficiency of vSAN ESA in both data storage and processing. The update increases the number of supported VMs per host from 200 to 500, allowing for high-density cluster designs. Customers can run more VMs over fewer hosts, especially in environments with the latest hardware. This update enables businesses to enhance their virtualization platform and increase resource utilization.
New Ready Node Profile and Support for Lower Endurance Devices
vSAN 8 Update 2 introduces the AF-0 Ready Node Profile, designed for smaller customer requirements and data centers. This profile, available with AMD or Intel CPUs, offers a cost-effective option for environments with lower-endurance write-intensive storage disks. It provides flexibility and efficient storage solutions that meet various workload demands.
Simplified Day-to-Day Operations
The update release simplifies daily operations for administrators. The Auto Policy Management feature, enhanced in this update, automatically adjusts the optimized default storage policy upon the addition or removal of a host from a cluster for maximum protection. This intelligent default policy administration reduces management overhead and ensures optimal resilience across the cluster.
Enhanced Reporting and Data Processing
vSAN 8 Update 2 improves the reporting of capacity overheads for objects residing in the data store. The new ESA object overhead category in the usage breakdown section provides administrators with a clearer understanding of capacity consumption overhead in their storage system instance. The enhanced reporting and data processing capabilities help administrators analyze and optimize storage usage.
Streamlined Management with vSAN ESA Prescriptive Disk Claim Capability
The vSAN ESA Prescriptive Disk Claim Capability allows administrators to define a standardized disk configuration outcome for hosts in a cluster. This simplifies the management of storage devices, ensuring consistent configurations across the environment. In case a host cannot maintain the prescribed configuration, vSAN’s health system detects and alerts administrators through the Skyline Health for vSAN feature.
Enhanced Security and Health Monitoring
vSAN 8 Update 2 supports KMS servers with a key expiration attribute, enhancing the security capabilities and hardening measures of infrastructure.
The Skyline Health for vSAN feature alerts administrators of impending key expirations, enabling proactive re-key operations and automating remediation processes. These improved security measures help organizations meet compliance requirements and mitigate potential risks.
Improved Performance Analysis and Analytics Tools
vSAN 8 Update 2 enhances the Top Contributors view, allowing administrators to identify performance hotspots over customizable periods. The vSAN IO Trip Analyzer now includes analysis capabilities for workloads running in a vSAN stretch cluster, helping pinpoint the primary sources of latency. These tools reduce resolution times for issues and enable administrators to optimize performance effectively.
Simplified Configuration of a vSAN Stretched Cluster and Two Node Topologies
Configuring stretch clusters and two-node topologies is now easier with vSAN 8 Update 2. Administrators can tag vSAN witness network traffic directly through the VMkernel configuration settings, simplifying networking. The vSAN express storage architecture now offers expanded options for witness host appliance sizes, including a medium-sized option. These enhancements support the design and implementation of vSAN stretch clusters with greater flexibility.
Download vSAN Max or License?
VMware Cloud Foundation and the vSAN advanced add-on for VMware vSphere Foundation are available with licensing based on a Per Terabyte (TiB) metric. This licensing approach allows customers to license the amount of storage capacity required for their specific environments.
Licensing guidelines require that you license vSAN for all raw storage capacity utilized by vSAN. It is essential to consider these guidelines.
VMware’s Edge Historically
VMware has a strong track record of seamlessly integrating and providing tooling as extensions of the vSphere client. It offers a range of operations and lifecycle management tools, software-defined networking capabilities through NSX, and more. VMware’s comprehensive solutions cover various aspects of business continuity, disaster recovery, and cloud infrastructure deployment. With a focus on simplicity and ease of use, VMware has gained the trust of administrators, businesses, partner MSPs, and communities.
Wrapping Up
VMware vSAN Max, introduced with vSAN 8 Update 2, is an impressive offering that empowers modern data centers. With its advanced features, scalability, and streamlined management, vSAN Max provides organizations with the flexibility, performance, and simplicity they seek. Whether it’s addressing specific use cases, overcoming storage limitations, or ensuring high-density cluster designs, vSAN Max delivers powerful storage capabilities. With VMware’s renowned expertise and comprehensive solutions, vSAN Max is a compelling choice for various environments, from small data centers to large-scale operations.
vSAN Max Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Update 2
vSAN Max enhances storage scalability in vSphere environments by providing a petabyte-scale disaggregated storage solution. It allows users to create highly scalable storage clusters that can act as primary storage for vSphere clusters or augment storage for traditional vSAN HCI clusters. vSAN Max clusters offer extreme capacity, with up to 360 TB per host, and can handle up to 500 VMs per host, which is a 150% increase over previous releases. This technology is ideal for organizations looking to reduce costs and improve performance while leveraging the simplicity of vSAN’s management interface
vSAN Max is a disaggregated storage solution that enhances storage scalability in vSphere environments beyond traditional vSAN offerings
No, vSAN Max clusters cannot be integrated with existing vSAN clusters. vSAN Max is a disaggregated storage solution that operates separately from traditional vSAN HCI clusters. While vSAN Max clusters can serve their local datastore to up to 10 client clusters, which can be vSAN HCI clusters or vSAN compute clusters, vSAN Max itself does not participate as a member within a vSAN cluster.
The Auto Policy Management feature in vSAN Max simplifies storage management by creating a cluster-specific default storage policy tailored to the unique characteristics of the cluster, such as host count and topology type. This feature ensures optimal levels of resilience and space efficiency for data stored on a vSAN Max cluster. The auto-generated policy is created when the feature is enabled and applies only to newly created VMs; existing VMs will retain their current storage policies until explicitly modified by the administrator12.
vSAN 8 Update 2 enhances the Express Storage Architecture with improved adaptive write paths and optimized I/O processing, increasing VM performance and throughput while reducing latency. It also supports a higher VM density per host, boosting the overall efficiency of the system. Also, the original storage architecture (OSA) has been improved.
vSAN Max addresses the need for high-density cluster designs by providing a highly scalable and elastic storage resource with the highest possible performance. It offers extreme capacity, supporting multiple petabytes per cluster without sacrificing performance. vSAN Max clusters can handle up to 360 TB per host, allowing for high-density cluster designs and increased VM density, supporting up to 500 VMs per host in vSAN ESA clusters, which is a 150% increase over previous releases.
vSAN 8 Update 2 introduces a new configuration for the vSAN Witness Host Appliance. Customers can now tag vSAN witness traffic in the witness host appliance through the VMkernel configuration settings, removing the task of tagging witness host appliance traffic through the command line. In addition, vSAN 8 Update 2 expands the sizes of witness host appliances available for vSAN ESA. 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 VMs1.
vSAN 8 Update 2 enhances the Top Contributors view and the vSAN IO Trip Analyzer to offer more detailed and customizable insights into performance hotspots. These tools help administrators quickly identify VMs placing the highest demand on cluster resources and locate sources of latency.
es, vSAN Max supports environments with diverse storage and compute needs. It provides a highly scalable and elastic storage resource with the highest possible performance, allowing customers to deploy a highly scalable storage cluster to be used as primary storage for vSphere clusters or augment storage for traditional vSAN HCI clusters. vSAN Max clusters can handle up to 8.6PB of capacity with NVMe flash supported and 3.6 million IOPS per dedicated storage cluster.
