VMware is the leader in virtualization in the enterprise. It has released VMware vSAN Max as the latest addition to their vSAN product lineup. vSAN Max is a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution providing maximum performance, scalability, and flexibility for modern data centers. It has advanced features and capabilities with the new Express Storage Architecture (ESA) in vSAN 8, which has significantly improved the performance and architecture of the VMware vSAN family in enterprises for the private cloud.
vSAN Max the most powerful vSAN
One of the most exciting features introduced in VMware vSAN 8 Update 2 is the new vSAN Max offering, which comes with a range of advanced capabilities. Since VMware Explore 2023 in Las Vegas, VMware has been showcasing extensive content around vSAN Max nodes.
The key message behind vSAN Max is that it’s a software technology stack built on the vSAN Express Storage Architecture in ESXi. It is designed to overcome the constraints of traditional storage by disaggregating storage and compute resources. This allows organizations to scale storage independently and address the limitations of previous vSAN editions. Many believe this marks a significant advancement.
vSAN Max enables enterprises to run HCI-like SaaS cloud infrastructure with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), especially with the newly introduced Broadcom subscription model licensing. Through this software stack, companies can manage virtual machines, Kubernetes workloads with Tanzu, and traditional storage solutions.
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This feature enables users to isolate resources, offering greater flexibility and efficiency in managing various use cases, such as vSAN File Services for iSCSI and SMB storage, virtual machine workloads, and more.
Organizations can leverage the advanced capabilities of the new vSAN ESA cluster, powered by NVMe storage and the latest generation of storage enhancements, to optimize application deployment and cloud transformation. With vSAN 8 Update 2, VMware has further improved the flexibility, efficiency, and performance of vSAN ESA through vSAN Max. The latest version of VMware vSAN Max, along with documentation, is now accessible for licensed customers via the Customer Connect portal under their account for download.
Let’s dive into more of the features.
Petabyte-Scale (PB) Disaggregated Storage for vSphere
vSAN Max provides petabyte-scale disaggregated storage for vSphere environments. It enables provisioning a vSAN cluster that serves as shared storage for vSphere clusters. Companies no longer have to provide and maintain storage arrays, controllers, and traditional architectures.
This approach is particularly beneficial for those seeking a three-tier architecture’s convenience combined with vSAN’s simplicity.
Scaling Storage with vSAN Max
vSAN Max’s introduction brings scale-out storage capabilities, a feature not available in many dedicated storage solutions. Users can scale out one server at a time, improving capacity and performance in a manageable and budget-friendly way that helps reduce storage cost as storage needs change.
vSAN Max stands out in reducing the total cost of operations, lowering costs according to VMware by up to 30% under certain conditions.
Unified Management Interface
One key feature of vSAN Max is its unified, single interface for management. It seamlessly integrates with existing vSAN clusters, allowing users to manage storage with the same ease and familiarity as other vSAN components. This functionality streamlines storage resource management, providing a consistent user experience.
vSAN Max: Addressing Diverse Use Cases
The traditional HCI model of vSAN has been successful, but vSAN Max extends this success by addressing specific use cases. It is particularly well-suited at providing centralized shared storage for entire environments.
For customers heavily invested in blades, vSAN Max offers an optimal solution, allowing the construction of vSphere clusters in a more strategic and cost-effective manner.
Architecture of vSAN Max
At its core, vSAN Max is a cluster of vSAN hosts designed solely to provide shared storage to other clusters. Unlike the traditional vSAN HCI model, which includes both storage and virtual machine instances, vSAN Max focuses exclusively on storage, serving as a storage cluster dedicated to data storage only.
This specialization enables vSAN Max to function as primary storage for vSphere clusters or to supplement storage for both vSphere and other vSAN clusters. Additionally, you can deploy a separate cluster to host the compute resources for the vSAN Max cluster.
Leveraging the vSAN Express Storage Architecture
vSAN Max is built on the vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) foundation, delivering enhanced performance and efficiency. The ESA in vSAN Max offers the features and capabilities required by customers seeking greater flexibility and efficiency.
Configuring vSAN Max Clusters
Configuring a vSAN Max cluster is a straightforward and user-friendly process. Administrators have the option to select from a traditional aggregated vSAN HCI cluster, a vSAN Max cluster, or a vSphere cluster utilizing remote vSAN-powered storage. Furthermore, vSAN Max can be set up as either a single-site cluster or a stretched cluster, providing resilient remote storage across two sites.
Auto Policy Management in vSAN Max
The Auto Policy Management feature in vSAN Max simplifies management by automatically determining the optimal default storage policy based on cluster size. This feature facilitates the provisioning of VMs, ensuring that they are configured for optimal resilience.
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 vSAN Max’s flexibility and ease of operation.
Ongoing Operations and Management
The ongoing management of a vSAN Max cluster is just as straightforward as its initial setup. vCenter Server offers an intuitive dashboard that presents essential information such as cluster health, performance metrics, and capacity. Furthermore, the client clusters linked to the vSAN Max cluster are displayed in a hierarchical topology, making it easier to understand the relationships between the clusters.
Enhanced Adaptive Write Path in Disaggregated Environments
vSAN 8 Update 2 enhances the Express Storage Architecture (ESA) with an improved Adaptive Write Path. This feature significantly boosts throughput and reduces latency in real-time without requiring administrator intervention.
The optimization of I/O processing in the upper layers of the vSAN stack results in a performance increase of up to 15% according to VMware. This is especially beneficial for mission-critical VMs that require high I/O per object.
Increased VM Density and Efficiency
vSAN ESA offers enhanced efficiency in both data storage and processing. With vSAN 8 Update 2, the supported number of VMs per host has been increased from 200 to 500. This improvement enables high-density cluster designs, allowing customers to run more VMs on fewer hosts, particularly benefiting environments with the latest hardware. While VMware Horizon is not yet supported on this architecture, it is expected that VMware will soon certify this increased VM density for Horizon, along with GPU support and other features that businesses need for cloud desktops.
New Ready Node Profile and Support for Lower Endurance Devices
vSAN 8 Update 2 introduces the AF-0 Ready Node Profile, featuring AMD or Intel CPUs, tailored for smaller customer needs and data centers, as well as edge environments with lower hardware requirements. This option is ideal for organizations seeking to leverage the new storage architecture and enhanced snapshot capabilities.
Additionally, the update includes support for lower endurance, write-intensive storage disks, providing a cost-effective solution for on-premises environments with less demanding applications. This is particularly beneficial for organizations exploring VMware and utilizing the vSphere vSAN solution for their virtualization platform, rather than relying on cloud services.
Simplified Day-to-Day Operations
The update release simplifies daily operations for administrators with several improvements to the product. The Auto Policy Management feature, enhanced in this update, now automatically adjusts the optimized default storage policy upon the addition or removal of a host from a cluster for maximum protection.
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 gives administrators a clearer understanding of capacity consumption overhead in their storage system instance.
Streamlined Management with vSAN ESA Prescriptive Disk Claim Capability
This new feature allows administrators to define a standardized disclaiming outcome for hosts in a cluster, simplifying the management of storage devices. If a host cannot maintain the prescribed configuration, a health finding in the Skyline Health for vSAN will be triggered.
Enhanced Security and Health Monitoring
vSAN 8 Update 2 supports KMS servers with a key expiration attribute, enhancing the security capabilities and security hardening in infrastructures from test environments to production (helping to meet compliance and security guides). The Skyline Health for vSAN will alert administrators of impending key expirations, allowing for re-key operations and providing other automation elements to automate remediation.
Improved Performance Analysis and Analytics Tools
The Top Contributors view, first introduced in vSAN 7 Update 2, has been enhanced to help 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 latency source.
Simplified Configuration of a vSAN Stretched Cluster and Two Node Topologies
Configuring stretch clusters and two-node topologies is now easier with the ability to tag vSAN witness network traffic directly through the VMkernel configuration settings, simplifying the networking. Additionally, the witness host appliance sizes available in the vSAN express storage architecture have been expanded to include a medium-sized option.
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 approach allows customers to license the amount of storage capacity required for their specific environments. It’s important to note that according to licensing guidelines, customers must license vSAN for all raw storage capacity that vSAN utilizes.
VMware’s edge historically
One of the advantages looking at the history of VMware as a company and VMware vSphere in the enterprise is the seamless integration and tooling that VMware provides as an extension of the vSphere client. For example, daily operations, lifecycle management tools (vSphere lifecycle manager for patch management and other lifecycle management resources), NSX software-defined networking, and vols.
vSAN and many other types of functionality are all at the fingertips of the VI admin. Developers have easy access to provision containerized workloads through Tanzu and Tanzu developer tools. Storage admins can expose a file system to end users using vSAN file services for the business.
Also, there are many other products and services in the area of business continuity for disaster recovery like VMware Site Recovery Manager orchestration for failover and failback in the DR, for creating redundancy at the site level. Best practices are already built into the solution. There is also the VMware Cloud disaster recovery solution to help reduce systems downtime.
VMware has done an amazing job in the way they have set management of very complex services and technologies under the hood to be a point-and-click operation in the UI to reduce challenges for operations and reduce complexity. Admins, businesses, partner MSPs, communities, and others have grown to depend on this kind of functionality and features on-premises.
With the cloud-enabled vSphere+ and VMware Cloud Foundation+, companies have cloud management capabilities for their on-premises infrastructure. They are known for reliability and delivery of solutions that just work.
Instead of just putting applications in an AWS service or somewhere else in the cloud, I think VMware has a really appealing offer still in the space of hybrid cloud.
Wrapping up
vSAN 8 Update 2, with the introduction of VMware vSAN Max, is a great new offering. The new disaggregation, core platform performance, and streamlined operations extend vSAN’s capabilities. It leads to more flexibility, performance, and simplified operations. These advancements make vSAN 8 Update 2 an excellent choice for various environments, from small data centers to large-scale operations, especially with the new ready node profiles.
- Design