What's New in vSAN 7 Update 2

[Music] this presentation showcases the new features and enhancements that vmware is introducing in vsan 7 update 2. [Music] today vmware's platform offers the levels of flexibility needed for today's rapidly changing needs it's built off of a foundation of vmware vsphere paired with vsan this provides the basis for a fully software-defined storage and virtualization platform that removes dependencies from legacy solutions using physical hardware next is vmware cloud foundation the integrated solution that provides the full stack of tools for an automated private cloud and finally there's vmware solutions for the public cloud vmware is partnered with industry-leading cloud providers that offer services based on vmware cloud foundation this allows customers to build a hybrid cloud consisting of public and private assets using a common substrate of management and tools for consistent infrastructure operations public cloud partners include vmware cloud on aws azure vmware solutions google cloud vmware solutions ibm vmware solutions and vmware cloud provider partners vsan 7 update 2 offers all new levels of flexibility and efficiency to meet the growing demands of our customers and their environments this presentation highlights the improvements in scalability performance intrinsic security and simplification of operations let's take a closer look vmware continues to enhance vsphere and vsan's ability to accommodate the needs of both developers and administrators with new features found in vsan 7 update 2. vsan 7 update 2 introduces enhancements for kubernetes powered workloads migration from the legacy vsphere cloud provider vcp to the container storage interface or csi is now supported the csi driver is what enables kubernetes to provision and manage persistent volumes when running on vsphere using the csi helps administrators more effectively run monitor and manage container applications and their persistent volumes in their environment also new to vsen7 update 2 persistent volumes can now be resized without the need to take them offline eliminating any interruption the result is more flexibility for your container-powered workloads through this enhanced integration found in vsan 7 update 2. accommodating for growth is the perennial challenge of organizations scaling quickly efficiently and with flexibility helps not only those who consume the resources but the organization's investment in the growth of those resources vsan 7 update 2 introduces several important new features and enhancements that improve the design scaling and performance of vsan clusters that comprise a data center let's see how vmware introduces a significant new capability to vsan hci mesh in vsan 7 update 2 traditional vsphere clusters can mount a remote vsan datastore hci mess compute clusters can consume storage resources provided by a remote vsan cluster in the same way that multiple vsphere clusters can connect to a traditional storage array hci mesh compute clusters use native vsan protocols for maximum efficiency and affords the customer the ability to easily meet a broad variety of use cases most importantly hci mess compute clusters do not need any vsan licensing scalability has also been improved where the number of hosts connecting to a remote vsan datastore has been increased to 128. one of the most interesting capabilities as it relates to hci mesh are the integrations with storage policies when defining a storage policy an administrator will be able to define the types of data services they're interested in such as deduplication and compression or data at rest encryption and the storage policy wizard will filter out the available data stores that meet that criteria this allows for an easy understanding of what type of storage may be available to multiple vsan clusters connected by hci mesh vsan native file services draws attention for many reasons its flexibility integration and capabilities make it a good fit for a variety of use cases vsan 7 update 2 extends the capabilities of vsan file services in new and interesting ways file services can now be used in vsan stretch clusters as well as vsan 2 node topologies which can make it ideal for edge locations also in the need of a file server file services in vsan 7 update 2 now supports data in transit encryption as well as the space reclamation technique known as unmap file services in u2 also introduces a new snapshotting mechanism for point in time recovery of files this mechanism available through api allows our backup partners to build applications to protect file shares in new and interesting ways and finally vsan 7 update 2 optimizes some of the metadata handling and data path for more efficient transactions especially with small files the nature of a distributed storage system like vsan means that a network connecting the host is heavily relied upon for resilient connectivity performance and efficiency vsan 7 update 2 now supports clusters configured for rdma based networking rocky v2 specifically transmitting native vsan protocols directly over rdma can offer a level of efficiency that is difficult to achieve with traditional tcp based connectivity over ethernet the support for rdma also means that the vsan hosts have the intelligence to fail back to tcp connectivity in the event that rdma is not supported on one of the hosts in the cluster vsan over rdma is a great step towards supporting topologies that are using the latest fast efficient delivery of east-west traffic using a network vmware continues to drive better performance with each new version of vsan this is achieved by optimizing the hypervisor and storage stack for the very latest and greatest hardware which is precisely how vmware was able to deliver improved performance with vsan 7 update 2. first changes were made in the hypervisor to better accommodate the architecture of amd based chipsets improvements were also made in vsan regardless of chipset to help reduce cpu resources during i o activity for objects using the raid 5 or raid 6 data placement scheme this will be especially beneficial for workloads issuing large sequential writes vsan 7 update 2 also includes enhancements to help io commit to the buffer tier with higher degrees of parallelization all of these add up to fewer impediments as i o traverses the storage stack and a reduction of cpu utilization which can drive up your return on investment security is a top concern for our customers and for vmware vsphere 7 and vsan 7 update 2 focus on improving the level of security that is intrinsic to the hypervisor while also accounting for the operational considerations in these highly secure environments let's see how security through data encryption is top of mind for many vmware customers encrypting data at rest is often a part of the security effort with vsphere and vsan 7 update 2 vmware introduces the support for the native key provider feature which can simplify key management for environments using encryption for vsan the embedded kms is ideal for edge or two node topologies and is a great example of vmware's approach to intrinsic security vmware has made a deliberate effort at improving the cloud connectivity for vsphere and vsan to deliver the very best in proactive health management and diagnostics through the customer experience improvement program ceip this has resulted in the skyline health initiative that are part of vsphere and vsan many of our customers must adhere to regulatory requirements that prevent connectivity to the internet with this in mind vmware now provides the skyline health diagnostic tool for health check management and diagnostics for isolated environments the skyline health diagnostics tool is a self-service tool that brings some of the benefits of skyline health directly to an isolated environment the tool is run by an administrator at a frequency they desire it will scan critical log bundles to detect issues and give notifications and recommendations to important issues along with their related kb articles the goal for our customers is a faster time to resolution for issues and for isolated environments this is the tool that will help with that simplified operations means predictable outcomes this is one of the reasons why vmware continues to make significant investments in improving the resilience and flexibility of operations with vsan vsan 7 update 2 introduces a series of enhancements that was a direct result of feedback from our customers beyond enhancements that improve the robustness of vsan the improved operational handling also includes all new levels of visibility for customer workloads let's take a look at some of these improvements vsphere lifecycle manager vlcm is vmware's new lifecycle management platform built into the hypervisor that was first introduced in vsphere 7. vsphere 7 update 2 builds on the improvements in past releases with new support for hitachi ucp ready node models offering more flexibility for our customers who use hitachi servers to power their environments vlcm has also optimized the recommendations engine so that it's refreshed upon change events such as when the image depot content is uploaded or modifications to the desired image specification for a cluster vsphere 7 update 2 also includes support for environments running vsphere with tanzu that are using nsxt for their network overlay these enhancements are a great example of how vlcm is maturing into a robust management platform for hypervisor management that benefits our customers and our oem partners deploying a new vsan cluster has never been easier with the improvements introduced in this release vsphere 7 update 2 has now integrated vlcm into the easy install and the cluster quickstart deployment wizards for deployments of new hosts and clusters from oems that support vlcm oem vendors now have all the capabilities in place to help their users deploy their new systems in a fast and fully compliant manner the workloads used by administrators for both new cluster creation as well as the greenfield environment where a vcenter server appliance is bootstrapped onto a single host have been updated to accommodate the ability to easily reference a host for easy compliance through vlcm host updates are a necessary task in the data center when a host is contributing cpu memory and storage resources the more quickly a host can be updated the better less time offline means more time in production this is where vsphere quick boot comes into play where host restarts during an upgrade can be accelerated by bypassing the hardware and firmware initialization process of a server vsan 7 update 2 provides better integration and coordination for hosts using quick boot to speed up the host update process by suspending the vms to memory and better integration with the quick boot workflow the amount of data moved during a rolling upgrade is drastically reduced due to reduced vm migrations and a smaller amount of resynchronization data when the circumstances are suitable quick boot can deliver a much more efficient host update process vsan 7 update 2 makes a significant improvement to ensuring the latest written data is saved redundantly in the event of an unplanned transient error or outage when an unplanned outage occurs on a host vsan 7 update 2 will immediately write all incremental updates to another host in addition to the other host holding the active object replica this helps ensure the durability of the change data in the event that an additional outage occurs on the other host holding the active object replica this builds off the capability first introduced in vsan 7 update 1 that use the technique for plan maintenance events these data durability improvements also have an additional benefit improving the time in which data is re-synchronized to a stale object for many years vmware vsphere and vsan have provided users the ability to maintain high availability of an application in the event of an unexpected outage vsphere ha is a cluster feature that is reactive taking action to make an application available again vsphere proactive ha first introduced with vsphere 6.5 is proactive taking action to remove applications off of hose suspected of imminent failure vsan 7 update 2 now supports vsphere proactive ha where the application state and any potential data stored can be proactively migrated to another host this is yet another great addition to making sure applications are running at their highest levels of availability stretch cluster configuration must account for not only a variety of failure scenarios but recovery conditions vsan 7 update 2 introduces integration with data placement and drs so that after a recovered failure condition drs will keep the vm state at the same site until data is fully resynchronized which will ensure that all red operations do not traverse the inner site link once data is fully re-synchronized drs will move the vm state to the desired site in accordance to the drs rules this improvement can dramatically reduce unnecessary read operations occurring across the isl and free up isl resources to continue with its efforts to complete any resynchronization post site recovery and finally vsan 7u2 also increases the maximum host count from 31 to 40. capacity monitoring and alerting see some great improvements with vsan 7 update 2 that make it easier for administrators to understand capacity limits and over subscription ratios in this release vsan 7 update 2 introduces the ability for the administrator to see how oversubscribed capacity is for the cluster vsan is inherently thin provisioned meaning that only the use space of an object is counted against the capacity usage over subscription visibility helps the administrator understand how much storage has been allocated so they can easily see the capacity required in a worst case scenario and adhere to their own sizing practices vsan 7 update 2 also provides customizable warning and error alert thresholds directly in the capacity management ui in vcenter server redundant alerting for capacity thresholds have also been eliminated to help clarify and simplify the condition reported to the administrator understanding the health and performance of a network is an important part of ensuring a hyper-converged platform like vsan is running at its very best vsan 7 update 2 introduces several new metrics and health checks to provide better visibility into the switch fabric that connects the vsan hosts several new metrics are included to monitor the physical networking layer including crc and carrier errors transmit and receive errors and pauses visibility is added at the tcpip layers including the arp drops and tcp 0 frames not only do these metrics show up in time-based performance graphs but new health alarms have been added to ensure an administrator knows they are approaching or surpassing critical thresholds all of these new network metrics and alarms will augment the existing collection of networking metrics already found in vsan to give administrators better insight into the health and well-being of their network automated alerts are one of the best ways for administrators to view the condition of an environment at a quick glance when issues arise sometimes it's difficult to sort through several alerts to understand how they relate to each other vsan 7 update 2 introduces new enhancements to help provide context and insight into the sophisticated collection of alerts found in vsan administrators will be able to easily view a timeline of discrete alerts which is especially helpful to understand a series of events that may have occurred the user interface now provides the ability to understand relationships with other alerts providing insight to the administrator of the core issue that could be the cause of the alerts it can be helpful for administrators to quickly see vms that contribute to the most demand on the resources provided by the vsan cluster heavily utilized vms sometimes referred to as noisy neighbors can be easily identified in this manner to determine if they may be having an underlying impact on the critical vms in the cluster vsan 7 update 2 introduces an easy way to determine the top contributors for these types of scenarios the view can be set to observe latency throughput or iops and can view either the top vms or the top disk groups used these will be shown clearly in an ordered list with a customizable time-based view to understand the history of the metrics desired this feature paired with the consolidated i o performance view introduced in vsan 7 update 1 allows administrators to navigate through these troubleshooting steps while staying in the vcenter ui the more meaningful alarms are in their description and guidance the more actionable they are for administrators this was the motivation behind several alerting improvements introduced in this latest release of vsan vsan 7 update 2 now provides much more descriptive titles that are easier to interpret they're paired with descriptions that offer dynamic text such as a specific device in a specific host in the messages to provide improved operational context vmware also removed conditions in which alarms from vsphere were similar to alarms from vsan and might give the false impression that there were more than one issue to address customers of vr ops will also benefit from these improvements as the messages feed into vr ops with vsan apis and finally we've introduced the ability to subscribe to an overall summary of vsan alarms this helps minimize the need of an administrator subscribing to each discrete vsan alarm which can result in missing newly introduced alerts all of this adds up to a much more comprehensive yet concise method of alert management for your vsan environment in summary we've seen that vsan 7 update 2 introduces an extraordinary amount of new features and enhancements to address the needs of administrators developers and consumers hitting on all four pillars shown here it's easy to see that the features included are not just a simple list of enhancements rather a coordinated effort to meet the growing demands of the data center whether it's on-premises at the edge or in the cloud

Channel: VMware vSAN

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Length: 19min 34sec (1174 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021