VMware: Virtual SAN 6.2 for Hyper-Converged Software

VMware, Inc. advanced its enterprise-proven, hyper-converged software with a release of Virtual SAN.

The firm is a leader in hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) software having sold to more than 3,000 customers in 21 months since the initial release of Virtual SAN.

As the foundation for the software-defined data center, HCI systems are the fastest growing converged or integrated systems ⁽¹⁾, and are expected to grow to $1.5 billion in revenues in 2016, according to IDC. ⁽²⁾ Combining software-defined compute, storage and networking capabilities with off-the-shelf x86 hardware, HCI systems simplify IT operations and increase performance while lowering IT capital and operating expenditures.

Firm’s hyper-converged software, consisting of vSphere, Virtual SAN and vCenter Server transforms x86 servers and DAS into simple and robust HCI systems that help organizations reduce IT costs and management complexity while achieving breakthrough performance. In conjunction with its expansive partner ecosystem, VMware offers its hyper-converged software on the broadest set of consumption options from turnkey HCI appliances developed jointly by the company and EMC to certified platforms in the form of Virtual SAN Ready Nodes available from eleven OEMs.

“VMware’s hyper-converged software is gaining customer traction due to its simple, cost-effective and high-performance architecture that enables customers to rapidly and predictably deliver infrastructure to meet business needs,” said Yanbing Li, SVP and GM, storage and availability business unit, VMware. “We anticipate that today’s launch of VMware Virtual SAN 6.2, which delivers up to 10x greater storage efficiency, will further accelerate customer interest in hyper-converged infrastructure powered by VMware software to build out their software-defined data centers.“

Virtual SAN 6.2 data efficiency features increase storage efficiency by up to 10x
The company continues to evolve its hyper-converged software with Virtual SAN 6.2, the fourth-generation of firm’s simple, enterprise-grade native storage for vSphere. This release introduces advanced data efficiency capabilities for all-flash storage, in addition to QoS and performance and capacity monitoring capabilities. The features will help customers to achieve a more cost-efficient performance, improve support for any application and accelerate time-to- value. With its data efficiency capabilities, Virtual SAN 6.2 will enable an all-flash HCI system for as low as a $1 per usable gîgabyte ⁽³⁾ and increases storage efficiency by up to 10x. ⁽⁴⁾

Features will include:

Deduplication and compression: Deduplication and compression optimizes all-flash storage capacity to provide as much as 7x data reduction with minimal impact on CPU and memory overhead.
Erasure coding (RAID-5/RAID-6): Erasure Coding helps increase usable storage capacity by up to 2x while maintaining the same high level of data resiliency.
QoS: QoS capabilities will provide increased visibility, control and reporting of the IO/s consumed by each VM helping to eliminate noisy neighbors.
Enhanced performance, capacity, and health monitoring: Features in the unified management plane make it easier for all customers to predictably realize the benefits of HCI systems powered by Virtual SAN.

Virtual SAN is designed to be the storage solution for vSphere VMs. The software enables core storage services for virtualized production environments, with greater performance, scalability, flexibility, and lower latency and cost. Featuring storage policy-based management, Virtual SAN shifts the management model for storage from the device to the application, enabling administrators to provision storage for applications in minutes. It is for a range of use cases including business-critical applications, VDI, ROBO, and test and development environments.

Extended Virtual SAN Ready Nodes
to ease customer procurement, support and deployment
In conjunction with the introduction of Virtual SAN 6.2, the firm is unveiling extensions to Virtual SAN Ready Nodes (pre-certified configurations of servers) through its OEM partners. To date, the company has partnered with eleven server OEMs to deliver more than 100 systems certified to run firm’s hyper-converged software.

New extensions to the Virtual SAN Ready Node program will provide OEM partners with the option to factory install vSphere and Virtual SAN with certified drivers and firmware to simplify day-one operations and accelerate customer time-to-value. Fujitsu, Hitachi Data Systems and Supermicro are the initial OEMs to offer these Virtual SAN Ready Nodes. These extended Virtual SAN Ready Nodes can also be bundled with software licenses or can accommodate customer-provided licenses. Additionally, OEM partners have the ability to offer unified support for both hardware and software components.

These extensions will enable company and its ecosystem partners to continue to offer customers the broadest selection of consumption models and system configurations. Over time, additional partner Virtual SAN Ready Nodes offerings will be introduced. The firm anticipates further expanding consumption options for its hyper-converged software later this month by partnering closely with EMC to develop a next-generation hyper-converged appliance family that leverages technology from EMC, VMware and VCE.

“In the past, we had limited ability to add storage or scale to meet our growing needs. Today with VMware Virtual SAN, I can add more disk on the fly without even thinking about it, and memory upgrades have become a breeze. I’m looking forward to the new QoS capabilities of Virtual SAN 6.2 to allow us to manage performance SLAs for our core business applications including our automation systems, ERP system and databases,” said Caleb Holmstrom, network administrator, Agropur Ingredients LLC.

“Using VMware, we reduced 21 physical servers down to a three-node cluster with local storage based on Virtual SAN. It exponentially increased performance. What used to take our users 30 to 45 minutes to accomplish — entering grades or scheduling, for instance — in the old environment, now takes less than five minutes. I’m looking forward to testing the new data efficiency capabilities of VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 on our all-flash storage system,” said Kenny Wilder, director, network infrastructure, Fulton County Schools.

“As a leading travel website, we support up to 25 million monthly visitors searching through our database of 634,000 hotels. Through VMware partner PlusServer, we use VMware Virtual SAN for a high performance, resilient and scalable shared storage solution. It ensures our business-critical applications are up-and-running even during the busy summer and winter seasons when we experience a surge of traffic. Working alongside PlusServer, we are keen to explore the new capabilities in order to achieve even more value from VMware’s hypervisor-converged storage for VMs,” said Frank Rössler, head, IT operations, HolidayCheck AG.

“As part of United Utilities overall digital strategy we have made major steps forward with our journey to building a software-defined data center. Taking advantage of hyper-converged infrastructure systems allows us to simplify our operations. VMware Virtual SAN provides us with enterprise storage services for our virtualized environments. It seamlessly integrates with vSphere and the entire VMware stack, bringing predictable scalability and high performance. With the latest release of VMware Virtual SAN, VMware continues to innovate and introduce key new features for software defined infrastructures, and that makes our job easier,” said Jorge Grifo, head, infrastructure architecture, United Utilities Group PLC.

Pricing and availability:

Virtual SAN 6.2 is expected to become available in Q1 2016. List price starts at $2,495 per CPU.
Virtual SAN for Desktop list price starts at $50 per user.
Partners are expected to deliver Virtual SAN Ready Nodes throughout 1H16.

Resources: Hyper-Converged Software Strategy Q&A with VMware’s Yanbing Li

⁽¹⁾ ⁽²⁾ IDC Hyperconverged Systems 2015-2019 Forecast, April 2015
⁽³⁾ VMware Virtual SAN hardware configuration created on Supermicro reseller website and assumes a 6x storage efficiency based on VMware testing of VDI workloads, December 2015.
⁽⁴⁾ Based on internal analysis and comparison to VMware Virtual SAN 6.1, December 2015