Now that the dust has settled I thought it would be useful to review the key announcements:
Virtual SAN 6.1, key enhancements include support for:
- Stretched Clustering with Zero RPO
- 2 node ROBO configurations
- vSphere Replication with a 5 minute RPO (exclusive to Virtual SAN)
- Multi-Processor Fault Tolerance (SMP-FT)
- Intel NVMe and Diablo Ultra Dimm
The Stretched Clustering feature will require the Advanced licence, which also includes support for All-Flash. The beta of the next release was also announced – this will include some hugely important enhancements:
- Disk Group based de-duplication (All-Flash only)
- Erasure coding (RAID 5 or RAID 6)
- End-to-end checksums with a background scrubber
I have written quite a bit about Virtual SAN, it always felt to me that it was very early generation software (because it was) and in many respects it was uncompetitive when compared to a storage array. With Virtual SAN 6.1 and beyond it looks like VMware are addressing many of these limitations.
vSphere/vCenter 6.0 U1, key enhancements include support for:
- Update Manager Web client – now available with full set of capabilities
Please note that the Update Manager server can only be installed on 64-bit Windows (i.e. it is not included with the vCenter Server Appliance).
Site Recovery Manager 6.1, key enhancements include support for:
- Storage Policy-Based Protection Groups – use Storage Profiles to automate the process of protecting and un-protecting VMs and adding and removing datastores from Protection Groups
- Stretched Storage
- Planned failover – with the ability to orchestrate the start-up order of VMs (something HA cannot currently do)
- Planned migration – with the ability to non-disruptively evacuate a datacenter using orchestrated vMotion and just a couple of clicks
- Integration with NSX 6.2 Universal Logical Switches – allows for the creation of layer 2 networks that span vCenter boundaries (with automatic network mapping) and Security Policies (such as security groups, firewall settings and edge configurations) that are preserved on recovered VMs
The Stretched Storage support is worthy of further discussion – with a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster solution you have a single vCenter and HA cluster, even though this is a very powerful solution HA does not currently have the ability to fully control the start-up order of VMs. SRM 6.1 brings this orchestrated granular control to both planned failover and migration, but it does require two vCenters and extra SRM licences.
HA needs support for orchestration of VM start-up order (for stretched and non-stretched clusters) and for DRS to be able to evacuate an entire site.
NSX 6.2, key enhancements include support for:
- Cross vCenter Networking and Security
- Universal Distributed Firewall – rules are replicated across multiple NSX managers enabling VMs to be moved across hosts that belong to different vCenters with consistent security policy enforcement
- Universal Logical Switches – allows creation of logical switches that span multiple vCenters
- Universal Distributed Logical Router – allows creation of distributed logical routers that span multiple vCenters
- Universal Security Groups – the groups and group memberships are synced across multiple NSX managers
- New VM IP address discovery mechanisms – uses DHCP or ARP snooping when VMware Tools is not installed
NSX is game changing technology with the ability to:
- Create and manage virtual networks just as we do VMs
- Enable micro-segmentation to secure our VMs
- Seamlessly stretch layer 2 networks over layer 3 physical networks
Hopefully, at some point, NSX will be included with vSphere Enterprise Plus and a subset of the features included with the lower editions – this will enable customers of all sizes to take advantage of the technology. One excellent bit of news is that NSX now includes the Distributed Switch, therefore NSX no longer requires Enterprise Plus. For those new to NSX I would recommend reading An introduction to VMware NSX Software-Defined Networking technology.
Technology Previews
Many of the other announcements were in fact technology previews of products we will see later this year or in 2016, highlights include:
- Cross-cloud vMotion – from an on-premise vSphere environment to vCloud Air (Content Sync to vCloud Air will also be supported)
- EVO SDDC – single pane-of-glass management of vSphere, Virtual SAN, NSX, vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight running on Dell (with Quanta/Cumulus networking) and VCE rack servers
- vSphere Integrated Containers – brings together the best of vSphere with containers by retaining the efficiency of containers with full VM granular resource and network management
- Photon OS – lightweight Linux OS optimised for containers and VMware environments
- Project Bonneville – isolates and starts-up each container in a virtual machine with minimal overhead using the Instant Clone feature of vSphere 6
- Photon Platform – new ESX Microvisor based on the core of ESXi, purpose-built for running cloud-native applications (Photon OS) that forgoes the rich capabilities of vSphere (i.e. vCenter, HA, DRS and vMotion) for API management, and improved scalability and efficiency
If you would like to dig a bit deeper into all the new developments, then why not attend the VMworld 2015 UK Update at VMware’s offices in London.
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