VMware vSAN 6.7 Released with New Features

Well exciting news today. VMware vSAN 6.7 has been released and it is an exciting release for sure! It seems like any news surrounding vSAN is exciting however. VMware vSAN has had wild adoption in the enterprise and is continuing to reign supreme among software defined storage solutions from various vendors. VMware has done a great job of making VMware vSAN simple and easy to use, intuitive to administrate and all control is found in the single pane of glass administration found right within the VMware vCenter server interface. Without further ado, what new features are found in this version of VMware vSAN? In this VMware vSAN 6.7 Released with New Features post, let’s cover some of the new and exciting features and functionality found in this newest redentition of VMware’s powerful software defined storage solution.

VMware vSAN 6.7 Released with New Features

A high level overview of the new features included with VMware vSAN 6.7 includes the following new features:

• HTML5 administrative interface (Clarity framework)
• vRealize Operations Management “within” VMware vCenter
• Windows Failover Clustering support for VMware vSAN 6.7 iSCSI service
• All new Redesigned Adaptive Resync feature
• Performance Improvements
• 4k Native Drive Support
• Better Support

VMware vSAN 6.7 New HTML5 Administrative Interface

VMware has made no secret about their push to get rid of the flash “Flex” administrative interface.  Every product that has been released in the past several months either has the HTML5 interface fully intergrated or has a chunk of functionality that implements the new client.  The new “Clarity” interface is a great new look and feel to the entire VMware vSphere experience and makes administration much more appealing, quicker, and cleaner.  VMware has spent a great deal of time improving the workflow for the HTML5 user experience.  So this is not just simply a “1-to-1” port from the old web client.  They have looked at how to improve things and have done a great job in doing so.

vRealize Operations Management “within” VMware vCenter

VMware is also making a push to provide a unified administration experience.  In previous versions and products, the administrative interfaces have been disjointed and fractured.  To get to the insights that vRealize Operations Manager provides you have to navigate between two different interfaces – between VMware vCenter and then between vRealize Operations Manager interface.  The swapping back and forth between interfaces to see pertinent information for managing vSphere infrastructure is neither efficient nor productive from a time perspective.  Also, you tend to miss things having to swap between interfaces with products.  The new vRealize Operations Management “within” VMware vCenter allows insights from vROPs to be displayed right inside VMware vCenter server.

Windows Failover Clustering support for VMware vSAN 6.7 iSCSI Service

One of the requested features for the iSCSI service has been support for Windows Failover Clustering support.  With this release, Windows Failover Clustering is now supported in the form of many Microsoft clustering technologies and products built on top of clustering technologies.  This includes Microsoft SQL Always-on Availability Groups, Microsoft Exchange Database Availability Groups, and Oracle Real Application Clusters.  What use case would exist where you would want to do this?  If you are running legacy applications with Windows Failover Cluster technologies, it allows running these workloads on the powerful VMware vSAN platform while still utilizing the technologies that legacy applications may still depend on.  This also allows administrators the ability to transition workloads to native vSAN platforms.

VMware vSAN 6.7 – All new Redesigned Adaptive Resync feature

The new Adaptive Resync feature of the new VMware vSAN 6.7 platform includes much better congestion control and an all new fair shair mechanism to ensure that resources are available for VM I/O, resyncs, and other operations during dynamic changes in load on the underlying vSAN system.  When I/O goes beyond the threshold of bandwidth that is provided by the system, the Adaptive Resync feature provides guarantees on the level of bandwidth to make sure one I/O operation is not starving the entire system.  This provides real intelligence inside the new VMware vSAN 6.7 infrastructure.  Consolidation operation performance has also been improved so that cluster maintenance and other operations requiring consolidation of components can happen even more quickly.

VMware vSAN 6.7 Performance Improvements

Performance optimization for VMware vSAN has always been a priority with VMware and the product.  With this release performance is still center stage.  With the VMware vSAN 6.7 release, performance in the data path has been improved.  The de-staging mechanism which handles the process of draining data from the cache layer to the capacity tier of storage has been improved so this process happens much more quickly.  This provides an overall performance benefit to the VMware vSAN 6.7 environment.  This improves performance for not only the resynchronization operations but also for the entire landscape of virtual machine performance with the VMware vSAN 6.7 release.

VMware vSAN 6.7 Includes Better Support

The health checks that are already baked into previous versions of VMware vSAN are pretty amazing.  The intuitive checks that are available right from within vCenter Server as well as the Online Health checks provide very deep technical health checks that can catch many issues before they become a real problem within your VMware vSAN environment.  VMware vSAN includes additional health checks that queries additional information from the VMware vSAN support Insight and provides those results directly to administrators.  This new health check information includes:

• Maintenance mode verification and decomissioning state
• Configuration verification for advanced settings
• vSAN and vMotion new checks
• vSAN Health service installation check
• Improved physical disk health checks
• Firmware checks dependent upon drivers.

VMware vSAN 6.7 Now Supports 4K Native Drive Support

A long awaited feature of vSphere in general has been 4K Native drive support. Officially as of vSphere 6.7 which is now released, VMware supports 4K drives. This includes VMware vSAN as well! So the long awaited support for the newest drives available with the newest technology is now in the sights of all VMware customers in an official supported manner.

Takeaways

VMware vSphere 6.7 is going to be an exciting release for sure!  In case you haven’t heard vSphere 6.7 has been released as well including VCSA 6.7!  There are lots of goodies to come here as well as we walk through the VCSA 6.7 release as well as take a closer look into more vSAN 6.7 features and functionality in the home lab.  VMware is certainly making a strong push to take the product to the next level and this release 6.7 is certainly worthy of taking note of.  Stay tuned for more updates soon!