VMware’s vSAN technology is certainly now becoming a mature product that has been tried and tested I the field by many customers at this point. According to the VMware vSAN site, that number is some 7000 customers. For those who are not familiar with VMware vSAN, virtualization is extended to storage allowing for a software defined storage solution which allows multiple hosts with local storage to pool that storage space. This allows for a robust hyper-converged solution that is hardware agnostic. With each iteration, we see new and exciting features being added to the platform. With the latest release, vSAN 6.6, this is no exception as many new features are added to the list including the following:
- Native Encryption
- Stretched cluster with local site protection
- vSAN Cloud Analytics
- Unicast Networking
- Configuration Assistant
- Management pack for vRealize Operations
- Enhanced degraded device handling
VMware vSAN 6.6 – New Features and Functionality
VMware’s vSAN 6.6 offers improvements across the board including the areas of security, scalability, and performance. Let’s take a look at some of the more exciting features of this vSAN release.
Encryption
Security is on everyone’s mind these days. With this release of vSAN 6.6, security is more in the focus of the product with the native HCI encryption for data-at-rest which protects critical data from unwanted access. The beauty of this technology is that it is hardware agnostic, meaning there is no need to deploy specific self-encrypting drives.
The encryption technology runs at the hypervisor level and not in the virtual machine itself so no dependencies within the VM. Also, great to know as well, the encryption feature allows for using the other features such as deduplication and compression that save space on the vSAN volume. This allows for not only safe data but space efficient data as well.
The encryption technology works by making use of a Key Management Server (KMS) for the encryption key. Note, this is not to be confused with the Microsoft KMS server for license keys. The VMware KB on connecting a vCenter Server System to a KMS server details a few of the vendors that are preferred for this functionality.
Stretched Clusters and Site Affinity
VMware vSAN 6.6 provides new enhancements when it comes to scalability and resiliency. The new enhanced stretched clusters have local site protection that protects the cluster in the case of both site failures as well as local component failures. With vSAN 6.6, storage redundancy within a site and across sites is provided at the same time! This type of protection protects against entire site outages as well as host outages. In the case of a host going down or a disk failure happening, with across site and within site protection, data does not have to be retrieved from offsite.
Below is the “Configure vSAN Stretched Cluster” wizard which allows for separating out hosts into multiple fault domains which are used for configuring stretched clusters.
New to vSAN 6.6 is the concept of site affinity. With this feature, we can decide which data crosses sites and which does not. We may want our production data protected across sites, however, we may not want our development or staging environment to cross sites. With vSAN 6.6, we can apply policies to keep data in a single site as opposed to crossing those site boundaries in a stretched cluster configuration.
We may also want to save the bandwidth of protecting “application protected” software services such as Exchange DAG or SQL Server using AAGs as they already have application high availability built into the technology. With saving unneeded data traversing sites, we make much more efficient use of our available bandwidth.
Unicast Networking
With previous versions of vSAN, we had dependencies on multicast network traffic. With this release, vSAN now supports unicast networking which greatly simplifies vSAN setup and configuration. With the intricacies of multicast no longer required, vSAN can be deployed to a greater number of on-premise and cloud environments.
Configuration Assistant
A new configuration assistant takes much of the heavy lifting out of the configuration process as well as troubleshooting if things aren’t working correctly. It can easily identify issues and configuration problems. It provides a central location to perform checks and configuration as well. Configuration assist can also automate the updating of the IO controller firmware/driver for many hardware partners. With a single click, the configuration assistant can download the newest driver and orchestrate getting it installed across the board. The supported list of vendors for this functionality includes Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Lenovo, and SuperMicro.
A view of the Configuration Assist options in vSAN 6.6. Note the warnings here as this snapshot was taken from a nested ESXi lab with a few things the assistant flagged, including HA and DRS not being enabled. It provides a great way to quickly check configuration status of the vSAN 6.6 cluster.
Enhanced Degraded Device Handling
VMware vSAN 6.6 provides a more proactive detection of degraded and failing devices. It provides more intelligent and predictive insights to degradation which allows vSAN 6.6 to proactively migrate data off of failing devices before a complete failure happens. The only prerequisite for this feature is capacity in the cluster to allow for resources to be migrated.
Thoughts
VMware vSAN 6.6 certainly delivers in terms of new features, functionality, and cutting edge engineering by the VMware team. VMware continues to innovate with vSAN and it provides a core platform for their SDDC. The new capabilities of vSAN follow suite with today’s thinking of having our data anywhere and being able to abstract data availability from the physical infrastructure underneath. There is no doubt about it – vSAN 6.6 is an innovative release that shows both the maturation and capabilities of the product.
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