Since Virtual SAN was released in March 2014 we have seen various functionality and features added, below is a list of the major features added in the 2nd release of Virtual SAN (Version 6.0)
- Fault Domain Support
- Pro-Active Rebalance
- All-Flash
- Virtual SAN Health UI
- Disk Servicability Functions
- Disk and Disk Group Evacuation
- JBOD Support
- UI Improvements such as:
- Storage Consumption Models
- Resync Dashboard
Recently announced at VMworld Version 6.1 is no exception, with even more enterprise features being included, just to be clear Virtual SAN 6.1 is being released as part of vSphere 6.0 Update 1, so if you missed the announcement, here is a recap of the features:
- Stretched / Metro Cluster with RPO=0 for sites no more than 100km apart and a response time of <5ms
- 5 Minute RPO for vSphere Replication, this is exclusive to Virtual SAN
- Multiple CPU Fault Tolerance (SMP-FT)
- Support for Oracle RAC
- Support for Microsoft Failover Clustering (DAG and AAG)
- Remote Office – Branch Office (ROBO) 2 Node Virtual SAN Solution
- Support for new Flash Hardware
- Intel NVMe
- Diablo ULLtraDIMM
- Further UI Enhancements such as:
- Integrated Health Check Plugin for Hardware Monitoring and Compliance
- Disk and Disk Group Claiming enhancements
- Virtual SAN On-Disk format upgrade
- vRealize Operations (vROPS) integration
This clearly demonstrates the investment that VMware is making in Virtual SAN, I will be writing up on some of the features in more detail, particularly the Stretched Cluster and ROBO solution, so watch out for those