Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

delta components

vSAN 7.0 U2 Durability Components?

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Last week I published a new demo on my youtube channel (at the bottom of this post) and it discussed an enhanced feature called Durability Components. Some may know these as “delta components” as well. These durability components were introduced in vSAN 7.0 Update 1 and provided a mechanism to maintain the required availability for VMs while doing maintenance. That meaning that when you would place a host into maintenance mode new “durability components” would be created for the components which were stored on that host. This would then allow all the new VM I/O to be committed to the existing component, as well as the durability component.

Now, starting with vSAN 7.0 Update 2, vSAN also uses these durability components in situations where a host failure has occurred. So if a host has failed, durability components will be created to ensure we still maintain the specified availability level specified within the policy as shown in the diagram above. The great thing is that if a second host fails in an FTT=1 scenario and you are able to recover the first failed host, we can still merge the data with the first failed host with the durability component! So not only are these durability components great for improving the resync times, but they also provide a higher level of availability to vSAN! To summarize:

  1. Host fails
  2. Durability components are created for all impacted objects
  3. New writes are committed to existing components and the new durability components
  4. Host recovers
  5. Durability components are merged with the previously failed components
  6. Durability components are deleted when resync has completed

I hope that help providing a better understanding of how these durability components help improving availability/resiliency in your environment with vSAN 7.0 Update 2.

I can understand that some of you may not want to test durability components in their own environment, this is why I recorded a quick demo and published it on my youtube channel. Check out the video below, as it also shows you how durability components are represented in the UI.