If you have been following this blog series on vSphere 7 we have been covering new features and changes to the architecture. Here are the previous blogs in the series:
- What’s new with Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) in vSphere 7
- vMotion Enhancements in vSphere 7
- What’s new with vCenter in vSphere 7
In this blog, we explore what has changed and what is new with vSAN 7. vSAN first released with vSphere 5.5 in March 2014.
- One of the most intriguing new enhancements is the elimination of the need to set the multi-writer for shared disks. This would also no longer require the need for EagerZeroThick VMDKs speeding up deployment of creating disk especially for large databases. We depend on the shared disks/VMDKs for Oracle RAC deployments.
- NFS v4.1 and v3 is new service to vSAN allowing the ability to create NFS shares. This is a nice feature. NFS mounts are a good way to create file shares between servers. We often use them during our database deployments.
- Added support for larger capacity drives up to 32 TB. The logical capacity also increased to 1 PB with deduplication and compression.
- vSAN 7 now has the memory metrics for vSAN in the vSphere Client. This allows for monitoring memory usage for vSAN instead of total memory for the vSAN ESXi host.
- Like the vSAN memory API added to the vSphere Client noted above vSphere Replication objects capacity monitoring is now available. This will monitor space used replication objects.
Having some experience with vSAN, in addition to the items mentioned above and other features from the previous version, vSAN tends to have a very high ROI when compared to traditional storage solutions.
Summary
vSphere 7 offers a variety of new features and enhancements. In this blog, we focused on vSAN improvements. In future blogs in this series, we will examine other vSphere 7 features and enhancements. Check back soon for the newest updates.
