Today at VMworld 2015, VMware Inc. announced the latest release of its extremely popular Virtual San solution, VSAN 6.1. This marks the third release of VSAN. This release will add even greater availability and management abilities. 6.1 will focus on delivering high performance and increased scale to provide enterprise-class storage for virtualized workloads, including Tier-1 production and business-critical applications.
Today at VMworld 2015, VMware Inc. announced the latest release of its extremely popular Virtual San solution, VSAN 6.1. This marks the third release of VSAN. This release will add even greater availability and management abilities. 6.1 will focus on delivering high performance and increased scale to provide enterprise-class storage for virtualized workloads, including Tier-1 production and business-critical applications.Since its release, VSAN 6.0 has attracted numerous customers to run their mission critical applications. We are still conducting a multiple part review of VSAN 6.0 starting here. With 6.1, VMware is further expanding VSAN’s capabilities with higher levels of enterprise availability and data protection.
Since its release, VSAN 6.0 has attracted numerous customers to run their mission critical applications. We are still conducting a multiple part review of VSAN 6.0 starting here. With 6.1, VMware is further expanding VSAN’s capabilities with higher levels of enterprise availability and data protection.
New capabilities include:
- Virtual SAN Stretched Cluster – Virtual SAN 6.1 allows the ability to create a stretched cluster between two or more geographically separated sites, synchronously replicating data between sites.
- Virtual SAN for Remote Office / Branch Office (ROBO) – Virtual SAN 6.1 provides the ability and support to deploy Virtual SAN clusters for ROBO scenarios. Customers can now deploy a large numbers of 2-node Virtual SAN clusters that can be centrally managed from a centralized data center through an individual vCenter Server instance.
- Virtual SAN Replication with vSphere Replication – Virtual SAN 6.1 utilizes vSphere Replication for its replication data services. vSphere Replication with Virtual SAN supports RPOs from 5 minutes to 24 hours. VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) can be used as part of the solution in order to deliver a fully orchestrated disaster recovery solution.
- Support for Multi-Processor Fault Tolerance (SMP-FT) – Virtual SAN 6.1 is now able to support vSphere Fault Tolerance feature and provide continuous availability with zero downtime for mission critical applications in the event of hardware failure.
- Support for Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) – Virtual SAN 6.1 now support clustering technologies from both Oracle and Microsoft. With Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) customers can run multiple Oracle RDBMS instances accessing the Virtual SAN datastore, delivering better performance, scalability and resilience. Similarly, with Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC)) failover clustering functionality is enabled, and can guard against application and service failures.
- Maximum Performance and Low latencies – VMware continues the performance improvement of Virtual SAN by expanding the support of new type of hardware devices and interfaces.
- ULLtra DIMM – ULLtraDIMM SSDs connect flash storage to the memory channel via DIMM slots, achieving very low (<5us) write latency. Ultra DIMM provides even greater density and performance – for example, it allows for a 12-TB All Flash Virtual SAN host in a thin blade form factor, as well as 3x improvement in latency compared to external arrays.
- NVMe – Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is a new communications interface developed especially for SSDs allowing for greater parallelism to be utilized by both hardware and software and as a result various performance improvements. Leveraging NVMe in a Virtual SAN all flash deployment resulted in 3.2M IOPS measured on a 32-node cluster – ~100K IOPS/Host.
- Virtual SAN Health Check-Plug-in – is a vCenter Server plug-in for the vSphere Web Client that is designed to provide and centralized health reporting solution that checks all aspects of the Virtual SAN configuration and health of hardware, data and its limits.
- Virtual SAN Management Pack for vRealize Operations – Virtual SAN’s 6.1 new integration with vRealize operations delivers a comprehensive set of features to help manage Virtual SAN with global data visualization.
Availability
VSAN 6.1 is being launched and demonstrated today at VMworld 2015. It is expected to be generally available in the third quarter of 2015.
VMworld 2015 News and Announcements
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