SMP-FT and (any type of) stretched storage support

I had a question today around support for SMP-FT in an EMC VPLEX environment. It is well known that SMP-FT isn’t supported in a stretched VSAN environment, but what about other types of stretched storage? Is that a VSAN specific constraint? (Legacy) FT appears to be supported for VPLEX and other types of stretched storage?

SMP-FT is not supported in a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster environment either! This has not been qualified yet, I’ve requested the FT team to at least put it up on the roadmap and document max latency tolerated for these types of environments for SMP-FT just in case someone would want to use it in a campus situations for instance, despite the high bandwidth requirements for SMP-FT. Note that “legacy FT” can be used with vMSC environment, but not with VSAN. In order to use legacy FT (single vCPU) you will need to use an advanced VM setting: vm.uselegacyft. Make sure to set this setting when using FT in a stretched environment!

When we announced Virtual SAN 2-node ROBO configurations at VMworld we received a lot of great feedback and responses. A lot of people asked if SMP-FT was supported in that configuration. Apparently many of the customers using ROBO still have legacy applications which can use some form of extra protection against a host failure etc. The Virtual SAN team had not anticipated this and had not tested this explicit scenario unfortunately so our response had to be: not supported today.

We took the feedback to the engineering and QA team and these guys managed to do full end-to-end tests for SMP-FT on 2-node Virtual SAN ROBO configurations. Proud to announce that as of today this is now fully supported with Virtual SAN 6.1! I want to point out that still all SMP-FT requirements do apply, which means 10GbE for SMPT-FT! Nevertheless, if you have the need to provide that extra level of availability for certain workloads, now you can!

smp-ft