This is hot off the press. VMware just announced some new exciting features with vSAN 8 Update 2 that comes after almost a year, when vSAN Express Architecture has been released. These new enhancements that come with vSAN 8 U2 are from then most part scalability enhancements, but there is also a completely new (sub) product that is now part of the vSAN package.
But let’s start with the biggest announce and it is a vSAN Max product that is a new product, that uses vSAN as a base brick, If I can say. vSAN Max has a Petabyte-scale with some extreme capacity and possibility of management across entire environment.
VMware has introduced vSAN as a Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solution many years ago so vSAN Max is building on the top of that.
What is vSAN Max?
vSAN Max is an architecture that has multiple topologies, and support File Services and VCF and it is using Express Storage Architecture (ESA). It is a high-performance storage cluster architecture that is powered by vSAN ESA.
VMware vSAN Max Storage Architecture
Disaggregation in vSAN is a very robust and successful method for vSAN customers to share vSAN storage resources with other vSAN clusters or compute-only clusters. Since vSAN 8 U1, vSAN disaggregation in VMware vSAN is now compatible with the Express Storage Architecture (ESA). Users can mount remote vSAN datastores that lives in other vSAN clusters and use an ESA cluster as the external storage resource for a vSphere cluster.
vSAN Mas is able to provide a storage cluster for the purpose of storage resources for your vSphere cluster and your IT environment. It is an independent storage solution, that is highly scalable and highly elastic storage resource with the highest possible performance. From the traditional perspective view, we can see that vSAN Max is a storage-only solution.
Here is the vSAN Max architecture compared to vSAN HCI
Note: vSAN Max is available only for vSAN ESA.
vSAN Max Benefits
- Scalability – Multiple Petabytes per cluster without scarifying performance.
- Reduced Costs – up to 73% reduction in OPEX compared to traditional three-tier storage.
- Extreme capacity – vSAN Max can have up to 360 TB per host in vSAN Max clusters.
Below you can see some of the constraints that customers have and that vSAN Max allows to be used for those cases where customer have challenges and want to reduce third party licensing costs, re-use existing hardware or use it as centralized shared storage solution for all VMware vSphere clusters.
Use cases of VMware vSAN Max
For example, with vSAN Max you can re-use your blade servers that can fit for the use case as storage servers. Those can be integrated into an existing environment, as additional hosts providing storage. Those types of servers can be used in environments with limited physical space.
The below image shows how vSAN Max architecture looks like. It shows that vSAN Max is not running any VMs and is used only as a storage cluster and provides storage capacity.
Note: A system VMs might be running on that cluster, which you know are for providing file level services. But no user’s VMs will be running here.
You can have several vSphere clusters connected to the vSAN Max cluster. You can also have vSAN ESA connected and using those vSAN Max storage cluster.
vSAN Max Storage architecture
Stretched Cluster Topologies
vSAN Max supports either single site or can be stretched across two sites. This architecture has client clusters which are the traditional vSphere clusters, and vSAN ESA clusters, and also Server clusters that has vSAN Max running in single or as stretched cluster topology. It is able to transmits storage traffic to/from client clusters using native vSAN communication stack.
vSAN Max topologies
From the past, you know that VMware has always done a good job (except perhaps one of the first vSAN versions) providing easy-to-use UI for configuration. This time is no different as the configuration and deployment of vSAN Max looks pretty easy.
As you can see, the cluster config can be configured as:
- vSAN HCI
- vSAN Compute cluster
- vSAN Max
vSAN Max deployment and configuration
Then you can proceed with the second part of the configuration and connect the vSphere cluster to the vSAN Max cluster.
You highlight the vSphere cluster > Configure > vSAN services > vSAN Compute cluster > Mount remote datastore.
You can see the steps on the image below.
Connect vSphere cluster to vSAN Max cluster in 3 steps
vSAN Max cluster monitoring
The vSAN Max cluster has a built-in monitoring for the whole environment including all the connected clusters. There is a dashboard that has cluster health score and history, with cluster performance and connected client clusters.
The topology presented within this dashboard is clickable and when you click either the connected client cluster or the managing vCenter server, you go directly to those respective views.
vSAN Max monitoring
vSAN ESA Platform enhancements
File sharing services on ESA – The vSAN 8 U2 brings new enhancements. One of them is the file-sharing services natively build on vSAN ESA (previously offered only on vSAN OSA only).
NFS and SMB protocols – this version also supports NFS and SMB protocls for traditional and cloud native clients.
Feature Parity with OSA – the U2 ESA is now feature parity as the Original Storage Architecture (OSA). As you know the ESA with the original offering lacked some of those features that OSA had. Now both versions have the same features and functions.
Native file services for vSAN ESA (still provided by system VMs)
Support for VCF 5.1 with vSAN ESA – this will be available when VCF 5.1 will be released.
Adaptive write path optimization in vSAN ESA – Use of more in-memory I/O banks to process incoming writes more quickly. The process is dynamic and scalable based on the demands of the workloads and it improves aggregate and single object (VMDK) performance in vSAN ESA with higher IOPS, higher throughput and lower latency.
More workloads on fewer hosts – now vSAN ESA supports up to 500 VMs per host which is 150% increase from the previous release.
New ReadyNodes – there will be new ReadyNode profile types based for performance and campacity, which lower TCO while benefiting from capabilities of ESA such as new snapshots, smaller failure domains or improved efficiency. Also support for newer Read Intensive NVMe devices.
Adaptive write path optimizations in vSAN ESA
Final Words
VMware vSAN Max storage cluster architecture brings large scalability and perfect integration with vSAN ESA. With enhancements to vSAN 8 U2 and the ESA architecture, this offering will be interesting for customers that have large storage needs and willing to take advantage of the simple deployment, monitoring and usage. The vSAN Max has been announced and demoed during VMware Explore 2023 Las Vegas, but as usually, we don’t have precise date when this offer will become available as GA.
