vSAN is vSphere-native storage powering the industry’s leading Hyper-Converged Infrastructure solutions.

FEATURES

Product Enhancements

The most significant new capabilities and updates of vSAN 6.7 include:

• HTML5 User Interface

  A completely redesigned user interface delivers a modern management experience. The new interface was built using the same framework as other VMware products, so you’ll have a unified and intuitive experience managing the most complete SDDC stack. In addition, the new UI delivers optimized workflows to reduce the number of clicks to perform many functions.

• vRealize Operations within vCenter

  Customers get two ways to manage their vSAN environments with vRealize Operations: Global operations overview in vCenter, and advanced monitoring, troubleshooting and capacity management with vRealize Operations. Customers gain a single pane of glass to monitor and control their HCI environment through vRealize Operations insights directly within vCenter, providing an overview of vSAN and vSphere environments as well as surfacing up critical alerts and operations insights. Customers can then expand the insights and actions as well as expedite time-to-value with full vRealize Operations advanced capabilities, including full environment overview across stretched clusters, troubleshooting with metrics and logs, and capacity management including time remaining, reclamation and deduplications and compression savings.

• Introducing vSAN ReadyCare

  vSAN ReadyCare support highlights VMware’s commitment to vSAN customers and delivers holistic support through people, analytics and technology. Through predictive modelling in vSAN Support Insight, VMware analyzes anonymous data from thousands of vSAN customers and pushes alerts to customers before issues arise. In addition, vSAN Health Services provide real-time support notifications and remediation recommendations.

• FIPS 140-2 Validated Encryption

  vSAN offered the first native HCI encryption solution for data-at-rest, and now with vSAN 6.7, vSAN Encryption is the first FIPS 140-2 validated software solution, meeting stringent US Federal Government requirements. vSAN Encryption delivers lower data protection costs and greater flexibility by being hardware agnostic and by offering simplified key management. This is also the first HCI solution with a DISA-approved STIG.

• Increased Application Resiliency

  vSAN delivers a more consistent application experience for end users with intelligent, self-healing capabilities that include adaptive resynchronization, fast failovers for air gapped networks, and replica consolidation. Adaptive Resync intelligently manages IO traffic to minimize disruptions to applications during resync operations. Replica consolidation reduces the time and effort to enter a host into maintenance mode. Finally, air gapped network failover times are eliminated due to immediate failover.

• Enhanced Stretched Cluster Availability

  Stretched Cluster deployments are further enhanced with intelligent witness traffic separation, primary site override, and efficient resyncs. Witness traffic separation and efficient resync optimizes the path and size of data transmitted over each link, making failovers transparent to application end users. Primary site override heightens availability of workloads by better logic in the event of site failure.

• Optimized Next-Generation Applications

  vSAN utilizes a new storage policy—vSAN Host Pinning—to adapt the efficiency and resiliency of vSAN for next-generation, shared-nothing applications. With this policy, vSAN maintains a single copy of the data and stores the data blocks with the ESXi host running the VM. This option is of particularly important for applications like Big Data (Hadoop), NoSQL (such as DataStax), and other applications that maintain data redundancy at the application layer.

• Increased Support for Business-Critical Application Deployments

  vSAN now supports more mission-critical application deployments through Windows Server Failover Clusters (WSFC) support, which reduces complexity of storage management for those workloads and helps customers accelerate their move toward a unified SDDC experience.

• Proactive Support via vSAN Support Insight

  Proactive support increases the reliability of vSAN through alerts before infrastructure problems arise, as well as reduced reactive support times by gathering data periodically. This feature requires enrollment in the Customer Experience Improvement Program.

• Adaptive Core Dump Support

  Adaptive Core Dump Support reduces vSAN support time to resolution for a greater number of deployment types by automatically configuring the direction and size of valuable data used to expedite support.

• Increased Hardware Support

  vSAN now supports 4Kn disk drives, future proofing vSAN deployments and creating an opportunity for you to lower your storage TCO.

Looking for additional information? View technical resources at StorageHub for vSAN, VVOLs, SRM and VR.