Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Taking VSAN to the next level, join the VSAN beta!

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In 2013 VSAN saw the day of light, the beta was released. Now 3 years later you have the opportunity to once again sign up and help improve our product. Over the last couple of years we have seen many new features introduced, so you may wonder what is left. There will be various enhancements in this release, but we are in particular looking for feedback on the following 3 features:

  • Software data-at-rest encryption
  • Local Protection for Stretched Clusters, for two-layer protection of stretched clusters: across sites and locally
  • New operational management enhancements (Health checks from vCenter, monitoring networking stats, and more)

I think most of these speak for itself, with regards to the Local Protection for Stretched Clusters, it basically allows you to protect your data within a site and across sites at the same time in a stretched cluster. In other words: RAID-1 across site and then RAID-1, 5 or 6 within a site. Something I am very excited about personally.

I don’t know how many people will be accepted for the beta, but if I find out I will report back. Sign up now: vmware.com/go/virtual-san-beta. PS: remember, these capabilities are still under development, are subject to change without notice and there is no guarantee of future availability.

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Comments

  1. I’m missing an option of more than one vsan volume per cluster – to mix all flash and hybrid setup in one cluster.
    Nested FDs is definitely useful.

      • The diskprice are not the only thing to consider when deploying AF VSAN. Licensing for Service providers, for example, is 50% more expensive (0.04 point vs 0.06 point per GB). I know you get dedupe and compression with the Entreprise addon, so my point is its not black and white. In some scenarios AF is cheaper (higher GB-price/lower usage due to dedupe and compression) and vise versa.

        Do you have an example where SSD’s is cheaper per GB than magnedic disks? (or do you take dedupe and compression into account also with that statement?)

        • Duncan, customers want multiple tiers of storage at different performance levels and price points. While being able to set QoS for a storage policy is great, the pricing on SSD still does not make sense at large scales even with Deduplication and Compression. This is likely a VCAN and service provider issue mainly but the pricing of SSD is still out of reach for most customers with the amount of data they need to store.

          Customers may have small footprints with 3-4 hosts and 20-30 virtual machines but need several TB of storage for just a few VM’s and they cannot bank on Dedup to make up the huge difference in price.

        • That is why I said “getting below”. In the US the prices are actually already lower in many cases, and that is without taking dedupe in to account. Seems to be different for EMEA though.

    • Hi Duncan,

      Do we know if the iSCSI target will work with vSphere hosts and if it will work in a Stretched cluster?

      This would be great feature that would allow customers to:

      1, Re-use some of their existing servers
      2. Expand compute in the cluster without needing to expand storage (one of the historic limitations of HCI)
      3. Support services that need very liitle storage but a lot of compute (i.e. Citrix XenApp)

      Also any comments on if we will be able to set Preferred Site at the VM level for a Stretched cluster – pretty important I would have thought.

      Many thanks
      Mark

  4. Can’t wait to try out nested fault domains – looks great… BTW, that “Hyperconverged Virtual SAN” logo at the top of the post looks awesome… Available on a T-shirt? 🙂

  5. What will be the process for enabling SW Data-At-Rest encryption on VSAN nodes (or VxRAIL nodes for that matter) when it becomes available. Is it the simple enabling of a checkbox after the VSAN firmware has been upgraded or is it a more involved, cumbersome process? Thanks!

    • It is done via Storage Policies (SPBM). vSphere 6.5 includes a sample policy for VM Encryption. You can create a new policy and apply it to the VMs you want to encrypt.

      • No that is not the same thing Mostafa. vSphere 6.5 includes VM encryption, and that is handled by SPBM.
        But Data At Rest Encryption is something else, tied to VSAN specifically and not available in the 6.5 release(hence this upcoming beta).

  6. Hi Duncan,

    I have been trying to confirm what VDI solutions are supported when you licence Virtual SAN for Desktops based on concurrent users/VMs.

    It is a given that Horizon View is supported, but I also assume that Citrix XenDesktop is also supported – is that correct?

    Also what about Citrix XenApp?

    Strictly speaking this is not a VDI solution, and you would therefore have many users per VM, but I was hoping you could licence this based on the number of concurrent users (not VMs) as well.

    Is that possible?

    Many thanks
    Mark

  7. Duncan,
    What is the difference between VSAN encryption and VM encryption. I was thinking it would be a feature of VSAN 6.5 but it looks like it a feature of vSphere 6 per VM.. Can you clarify..

    • My take on this is that VM encryption is done on a VM, and not datastore, level.
      This means, among other things, that dedupe and compression will not be very effective with VM encryption. But the VM is “isolated” from other VMs and protected “in flight”.

      With VSAN D@RE the whole datastore will be encrypted, so all VMs on it will be encryptet “at rest”. I.e. if someone physically steals a disk from the VSAN cluster they cannot recreate the data. Also since the encryption is done on datastore level it is possible to use dedupe and compression with goot results. The downside is VMs are not isolated from each other, and not protected “in flight”.

      So both features are complements to each other, they solve difference problems.