by Duncan Epping
vSAN 6.6 is available now. Check the release notes before you upgrade! Also note that for vSAN users currently on 6.0 Update 3 – upgrade to vSAN 6.6 is not yet supported. If you like to learn more about vSAN 6.6 check the following material:
Note that vSAN 6.6 comes as a patch release, download the bits here from the vSAN 6.6 landing page:
I am in Australia this week for the Sydney and Melbourne VMUG UserCon’s. Had a bunch of meetings yesterday and this morning the news was dropped that Intel Optane support was released for vSAN. The performance claims look great, 2.5x more IOPS and 2.5x less latency. (I don’t know the test specifics yet.) On top of that, Optane typically has a higher endurance rating, meaning that the device can incur a lot more writes, which makes it an ideal device for the vSAN caching layer.
While talking to customers the past couple of days though it was clear to me that performance is one thing, but flexibility of configuration is much more important. With vSAN you have the ability to select any server from the vSphere HCL and pick the components you want as long as they are on the vSAN HCL. Or you can simply pick a ready node and swap components as needed. As long as the controller remains the same for a ready node you can do that. Either way, you have choice, and now with Optane being certified you can use the latest in flash technology with vSAN!
Oh for those paying attention, the Intel P4800X Optane device isn’t listed on the HCL yet. The database is being updated as we speak, and the device should be included soon!
As John Nicholson was traveling in and around New Zealand I was asked by Pete if I could co-host the Virtually Speaking Podcast again. It is always entertaining to join, Pete is such a natural when it comes to these things. I euuh, well I do my best to keep up with him :). Below you can find the latest episode on the topic of vSAN Customer Use Cases. It includes a lot of soundbites recorded at VMware World Wide Kick Off / Tech Summit, which is a VMware internal event for all Sales, Pre-Sales and Post-Sales field facing people.
You can of course also subscribe on iTunes!
VMware announced the Q4 earnings last night, one of the things I was most interested about was how vSAN did in Q4. Here is what was announced yesterday, for those interested in more detail check the full earnings call. (Hint, it isn’t just vSAN doing well.)
Awesome growth (5500 customers in Q3 reached) if you ask me. Really ramping up fast now, and I cannot wait for us to hit 10k. (That is going to be a big party Yanbing / Christos.)
Before I forget, I want to thank all VMware colleagues and all of our partners who are helping us making vSAN one of the fastest growing products within VMware. We couldn’t do this without you, lets kill it again in the upcoming months!
Oh, I just noticed a great post by Lee Caswell on LinkedIn on these numbers, make sure to read that one.
This is something that has kept me busy for a while. For the past 2 years there were some challenges with regards to the use of MCS and XenDesktop/XenApp in combination with vSAN. In fact, Citrix never supported vSAN and MCS, and it actually did not work either. PVS worked great in combination with vSAN however. Some customers though prefer to use MCS. After various discussions, emails and engineering discussions it seems that the problem customers faced has finally been resolved.
Citrix recently announced a hotfix that will allow you to use MCS with XenDesktop/XenApp 7.12 and vSAN version 6.0, 6.2 or 6.5. You can find the hotfix and details here: https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX219670
I would like to thank a couple of folks for making this happen, from Citrix: Christian Reilly (Thanks for connecting me to everyone!), Vishal Ganeriwala, Paul Browne, Yuhua Lu, Rick Dehlinger, Amanda Austin and from VMware Weiguo He, Tony Kuo and Sophie Ting Yin. Thanks everyone for making this happen in between releases. I am certain our joint customers will appreciate this! Note, that it is not a full statement of support (yet), but a great step in the right direction!
For those interested in XenDesktop/XenApp with vSAN, make sure to read this great reference paper by Sophie Yin. It provides a lot of detail around performance etc.