vSAN

What’s New in vSAN 8 Update 1

Sadaf

On August 30, 2022, VMware announced vSAN 8 with a different architecture called vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA). You may have already heard about the significant performance improvement, increased network throughput, and enhanced scalability that ESA offers. However, VMware has continued to innovate. With vSAN 8 U1, additional features and capabilities have been added to both the original vSAN architecture (OSA) and ESA, providing even greater flexibility and efficiency. In this article, we will focus on the new features of vSAN 8 Update 1.

The new capabilities in vSAN 8U1 are categorized into four pillars: Disaggregation, Performance Enhancement, Ease of Use, and Cloud-Native Storage.

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My IT Journey!

Sadaf

I am thrilled to announce that I am starting a new position as a Senior Solution Engineer at VMware!

My name is Sadaf, I am originally Iranian, but I live in Sweden! I am a double VCIX, vExpert, and vSAN specialist with more than ten years of experience in Information Technology!

In this post, I want to share my journey with you, especially for women who want to start their career in IT but are hesitant because they are afraid of not being accepted or judged in this man-dominant field! I just forgot! Heh! I am also an expert at being judged and bullied but never get surrendered, thanks to my non-relevant bachelor’s! But you know what? I could do it, so can you!

I have studied Business Administration, but my path crossed with IT when I was on an internship about 12 years ago!

I was part of the sales engineering team responsible for helping customers get certified in the Information Security Management System(ISMS)/ISO 27001.

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Configure vSAN Stretched Cluster

Sadaf

vSAN Stretched cluster introduced in vSAN 6.1 and it brings high availability in an active-active fashion. In this architecture, ESXi hosts would be placed in two different physical locations and join together with high bandwidth low latency networking. But from a management perspective despite hosts being in two different sites they belong to one single vSAN Cluster and share their resources. So this solution can be used in environments where disaster avoidance is a critical matter. Because it gives you the ability to avoid disaster, or recover from a disaster by having two different physical sites that host your applications. So you need to group the hosts based on their physical locations and put them in two different fault domains.

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vSAN Deployment without existing vCenter Server

Sadaf

VMware vSAN is Software-Defined Storage(SDS) solution from VMware that is fully integrated into vSphere. To enable vSAN, we need to have a minimum of three ESXi hosts, and each host needs at least one cache disk and one capacity disk. The local disks of ESXi hosts should be formatted by VMFS. Since vSAN is a vSphere clustering feature, we should also have Center Server in place before start implementing it.

If you are a System Administrator or even a Solutions Architect, you might a face a challenge to build a vSAN Cluster with minimum ESXi servers without having a vCenter in place. In many green field environments, vCenter has not been installed and you want to keep ESXi’s disks intact and unformatted. In addition, there are some customers that want to build and manage vSAN Cluster in a separate vCenter and they do not have any additional ESXi host for vCenter deployment.

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VxRail 2-Node Implementation Considerations (VxRail 7.0.100)

Sadaf

Starting with version 4.7.100, VxRail supports vSAN 2-Node for small and Remote-Office Branch-Office (ROBO) deployments. This solution works best for environments that needs hyperconverged compute and storage with a minimal configuration. VxRail 2-Node consists of two VxRail E560 nodes and a vSAN Witness Appliance. It is recommended to deploy the Witness appliance in another site but in case of lacking another site it can be deployed in the same site as vSAN 2-Node.

There are some considerations and requirements that you need to have it in place before starting the VxRAIL 2-Node implementation.

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VMware vSAN 7.0 Witness Appliance Deployment

Sadaf

As part of vSAN Stretched or 2-Node cluster configuration, a witness appliance should be deployed and configured. This witness appliance will host witness components that are being used in split-brain failure scenarios. The witness component will act as a tie-breaker and help vSAN cluster to satisfy the quorum requirements. The witness server could be installed as a dedicated physical ESXi host or a specialized virtual witness appliance can be used instead. The main reason for having witness as a virtual appliance is it does not require an extra vSphere license to consume and eventually save some cost especially for smaller implementation like ROBO. The other reason behind using a virtual appliance is for multi-cluster environments like VCF stretched cluster implementation. Due to the reason of each vSAN cluster needs its own witness, then you can consolidate all of them on one physical host on a third site.

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