VMware’s Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) approach extends virtualization concepts like pooling, abstraction and automation to all data center resources and services. The SDDC includes components for compute-, network-, and storage virtualization. VMware made several announcements in the field of SDDC:
- VMware VSAN 6.1
- VMware EVO SDDC
Read on to learn more about these announcements.
Virtual SAN
Since it launch Virtual SAN did already undergo some great improvements. At VMworld 2015 some interesting additional enhancements and improvements are announced:
- Support for stretched cluster configurations, including stretched cluster health monitoring. In a stretched cluster VSAN scenario you can deploy virtual SAN between geographically dispersed locations. It’s based on an active/active architecture. The streched cluster scenario is supported for both hybrid as well as full flash VSAN configurations.A VSAN streched cluster also involves the deployment of a witness appliance which can be hosted on vCloud Air or deployed to your own third site. Also introduced are fault domains and site read locality.A VSAN stretched cluster configuration support both L3 routed networks and L2 networks with a maximum latency of 5 ms.
- Enhanced vSphere Replication – vSphere Replication now supports a minimum RPO of 5 ms between VSAN datastores. The 5 minutes RPO is exclusively available to Virtual SAN 6.x.
- Support for FT, Oracle RAC and Windows Server Failover Clustering – VSAN now supports VMware Fault Tolerance, Oracle RAC and Windows Server Failover Clustering. Exchange DAG cluster configurations are only supported with file share witness quorums.
- New SSD drives are supported: Intel NVMe and Diablo Ultra DIMM – NVMe and Diablo Ultra Dimm are both supported.
- A two node cluster size is now supported – A VSAN two node cluster is now supported; this configuration requires a third node: the witness virtual machine.
VSAN 6.1 also introduces some improvements to usability and management. Think of upgrading through the UI, disk group disk bulk claiming and of course the required configuration options for stretched cluster. Also available are central health reporting options via vCenter alarms. These alarms are triggered in case of unsupported hardware or if a periodic health checks fails. The VSAN health check includes check for your stretched configuration and some pro-active test on virtual machines, multicast and storage performance.
VSAN 6.1 comes with the new Virtual SAN Management Pack for vRealize Operations for full integration with vRealize Operations Manager 6.vRealize operations delivers a comprehensive set of features to help manage Virtual SAN:
- Global View
- Performance Monitoring
- Capacity Monitoring and planning
- Health Monitoring and Availability
The screen dumps give you a first impression of this integration.
VMware EVO SDDC
When it comes to hardware in a SDDC there are three approaches: BYOD (build your own datacenter), converged infrastructure (like FlexPod or VCE) or hyper converged (EVO:RAIL, Nutanix, Atlantis Hyperscale). A new approach is this field is VMware EVO SDDC, formerly known as VMware EVO:RACK. EVO SDDC consist of full rack with 24 servers, two 10 Gb Top of Rack switches, 1 Gb management switch for out of band connectivity. The first rack in your setup also includes two 40 Gb spine switches.
The EVO SDDC software layer includes vSphere, Virtual SAN and NSX for virtualization. For operations management vRealize Operations, vRealize Log Insight and optionally vRealize Automation and Horizon View are used. The EVO SDDC Manager is a new component and added to the configuration. The EVO SDDC Manager is responsible for updates to the entire stack, including BIOS updates. There are several partner plans with VCE, Quanta and DELL to build integrated systems based on EVO SDDC. You can use VSAN storage or connect external ethernet based external storage.
EVO SDDC installation consist of four simple steps: power the rack on, automatic installation of the rack, second boot completed by customer and the customer can create workloads. Several physical racks can be combined into one virtual rack. Each virtual rack has a 3 host management cluster which runs the management components. On EVO SDDC you deploy one or more workload domains, for example a production domain, test/dev domain and/or a domain for VDI. A workload domain has its own vCenter management server, NSX manager and NSX controllers. A VDI domain adds the Horizon View components to the domain.
I hope you will find this useful, please stay tuned for more posts this week straight from VMworld.
Also read:
– VMworld 2015: What’s new in SRM 6.1
– VMworld 2015: vCloud Air improvements and new features
