What’s New with vSAN

• High Availability Solutions for Cloud Native Storage 
  
  
  • The vSAN CSI driver is now supported with stretched clusters, enabling higher availability to mitigate outages. Stretched clusters extend a vSAN cluster from a single site to two sites for higher availability and intersite load balancing. Maintenance or loss of one site does not affect the overall operation of the cluster, allowing the use of stretched clusters for planned maintenance and disaster scenarios.
  • vSAN adds Kubernetes Topology support for high availability, and the CSI driver now enables Kubernetes to distribute replicas across multiple availability zones (AZs) managed by a single vCenter instance for availability purposes. Virtual Infrastructure Admins can configure individual vSphere clusters or DRS host groups as Kubernetes zones, and developers can use zone tags to deploy PVs across multiple zones.  
• S3-Compatible Object Storage for Your AI/ML, Cloud Native Workloads Dell EMC ObjectScale is 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. In addition, you can upgrade your object storage services asynchronously, without having to update your VMware environment to the latest release. This means you get, the latest features as soon as they are available.

*Dell EMC ObjectScale needs to be acquired separately

• Enhanced Network Monitoring and Troubleshooting In this release, vSAN provides additional networking health checks, proactively addressing common deployment issues that result in support requests. Health checks include:
  
  
  • Identifying duplicate IP addresses
  • Enabling temporary pause in data transmission during network congestion to avoid packet loss
  • Performing a MTU configuration test across VMK and vSwitch to optimize performance by reducing latency
  • Enabling the port for vSAN mandatory services


• Health Check Correlation Sometimes, a single deployment issue can trigger multiple health checks, making it difficult to identify the underlying cause. vSAN 7 Update 3 uses data from VMware Skyline Health to correlate multiple health issues and highlight the root cause of the alerts, enabling admins to rapidly identify the most salient issue and to quickly address it. When combined with the health check history feature, troubleshooting becomes much easier.
• I/O Trip Analyzer Get an overview of the vSAN I/O path for a VM with a single click, creating a single source of information to troubleshoot problems. Information provided includes:
  
  
  • Visual I/O trip diagram
  • Drill down of VM I/O latency by travel stage
  • Breakdown statistics: average, standard deviation of I/O latency in each stage


• vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) Enhancements No need to manually check whether firmware updates are on the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) to ensure vSAN will run predictably. vSAN 7 Update 3 validates disk device firmware against the HCL before applying the desired image across the cluster. In addition, vSphere Lifecycle Manager will upgrade dedicated witnesses (not shared witnesses) for 2-node and stretched cluster deployments.