What’s New with vSAN

• Cloud Native Storage enhancements. Resize your persistent volumes without having to take them offline, allowing you to scale storage to meet dynamic business needs with minimal disruption. Easily migrate from vSphere Cloud Provider (VCP) to Container Storage Interface (CSI) to take advantage of the latest and greatest storage technologies for your Kubernetes workloads.
  Cloudian HyperStore and MinIO Object Storage are now integrated with the vSAN Data Persistence platform, bringing S3-compatible object storage to vSAN**. Strategic partnerships with DataStax and Dell EMC enable these partners to bring their services into VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu through integration with the vSAN Data Persistence platform.

• S3-Compatible Object Storage for your AI/ML, cloud native workloads. Cloudian HyperStore and MinIO Object Storage* are now available on the vSAN Data Persistence platform. This allows you to efficiently deploy and consume S3-compatible object stores for your AI/ML, cloud native applications right from the ubiquitous hybrid cloud platform of VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu.

*Cloudian HyperStore and MinIO Object Storage need to be acquired separately.

• HCI Mesh. Enable a unique, software-based approach for disaggregation of compute and storage resources. This native, cross-cluster architecture brings together multiple independent vSAN clusters to disaggregate resources and enable utilization of stranded capacity. It also allows vSAN clusters to share storage capacity with compute clusters, or non-HCI vSphere clusters. You can now adopt HCI without needing to replace existing servers, scale compute and storage independently and precisely to meet application needs, and optimize resource utilization across clusters, all while maintaining the operational simplicity of HCI. This simplified approach does not require specialized hardware.

• Stretched Cluster Enhancements. Scale up to 20 nodes per primary or secondary site in a stretched cluster. Stretched clusters are now DRS aware – in a failback situation, the VMs can now stay at the failover site and continue to read/write at the failover site until resync is complete, providing more consistent performance during failback. In addition, vSAN File Services is now site aware, so in the event of failure of container hosting file services, vSAN knows where to restart it. You can extend high availability of your files using this method.

• Improved Performance and Efficiency. VMware continues to deliver capabilities that drive better performance of vSAN, including vSAN over Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and enhancement to RAID 5/6 erasure coding that improve CPU utilization and app performance for certain workloads.

• vSAN over RDMA. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is a technology that allows computers in a network to exchange data in main memory without involving the processor, cache or operating system of either computer. RDMA improves throughput and performance by freeing up resources. RDMA also facilitates a faster data transfer rate and low-latency networking. It can be implemented for networking and storage applications. vSAN over RDMA may increase application performance and obtain better VM consolidation ratios.

• Enhanced Monitoring and Troubleshooting. Rapidly identify root causes of issues and ways to remediate with more tools in vSAN that offer proactive capacity management, new networking metrics, performance top contributors, and health check history and correlation.

• vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) Enhancements. vLCM now updates vSphere with Tanzu (with NSX-T networking), and it will update the Kubernetes/Tanzu layers in a non-disruptive fashion that does not require host reboot or maintenance mode. vLCM now also extends to select Hitachi Vantara UCP ReadyNodes.

• Enhanced Data Durability. Minimize downtime and data loss in planned and unplanned outages with delta writes, the ability of vSAN to make a best effort to store changes to a disk. This enhancement benefits configurations where Failure to Tolerate (FTT) is set to 1.

• vSAN Support for vSphere Native Key Provider. vSAN now supports vSphere Native Key Provider. For vSAN ROBO deployments, the core data center sends a key to store a local in the vSphere Native Key Provider; in the event of loss connectivity, vSphere simply accesses the local keys until connectivity is restored.

• FIPS140-2 Validation for Data-in-Transit Encryption. The vSAN cryptographic module for data-in-transit encryption has achieved FIPS 140-2 validation, meeting strict government requirements.