This topic summarizes characteristics that apply to vSAN, its clusters, and datastores.
vSAN provides numerous benefits to your environment.
| Supported Features | Description |
|---|---|
| Shared storage support | vSAN supports VMware features that require shared storage, such as HA, vMotion, and DRS. For example, if a host becomes overloaded, DRS can migrate virtual machines to other hosts in the cluster. |
| On-disk format | vSAN on-disk virtual file format provides highly scalable snapshot and clone management support per vSAN cluster. For information about the number of virtual machine snapshots and clones supported per vSAN cluster, refer to the vSphere Configuration Maximums https://configmax.esp.vmware.com/home. |
| All-flash and hybrid configurations | vSAN can be configured for all-flash or hybrid cluster. |
| Fault domains | vSAN supports configuring fault domains to protect hosts from rack or chassis failures when the vSAN cluster spans across multiple racks or blade server chassis in a data center. |
| iSCSI target service | vSAN iSCSI target service enables hosts and physical workloads that reside outside the vSAN cluster to access the vSAN datastore. |
| Stretched cluster | vSAN supports stretched clusters that span across two geographic locations. |
| Support for Windows Server Failover Clusters (WSFC) | vSAN 6.7 Update 3 and later releases support SCSI-3 Persistent Reservations (SCSI3-PR) on a virtual disk level required by Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) to arbitrate an access to a shared disk between nodes. Support of SCSI-3 PRs enables configuration of WSFC with a disk resource shared between VMs natively on vSAN datastores.
Currently the following configurations are supported:
Note: Microsoft SQL Server 2012 or later running on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 or later has been qualified on
vSAN.
|
| vSAN health service | vSAN health service includes preconfigured health check tests to monitor, troubleshoot, diagnose the cause of cluster component problems, and identify any potential risk. |
| vSAN performance service | vSAN performance service includes statistical charts used to monitor IOPS, throughput, latency, and congestion. You can monitor performance of a vSAN cluster, host, disk group, disk, and VMs. |
| Integration with vSphere storage features | vSAN integrates with vSphere data management features traditionally used with VMFS and NFS storage. These features include snapshots, linked clones, and vSphere Replication. |
| Virtual Machine Storage Policies | vSAN works with VM storage policies to support a VM-centric approach to storage management. If you do not assign a storage policy to the virtual machine during deployment, the vSAN Default Storage Policy is automatically assigned to the VM. |
| Rapid provisioning | vSAN enables rapid provisioning of storage in the vCenter Server® during virtual machine creation and deployment operations. |
| Deduplication and compression | vSAN performs block-level deduplication and compression to save storage space. When you enable deduplication and compression on a vSAN all-flash cluster, redundant data within each disk group is reduced. Deduplication and compression is a cluster-wide setting, but the functions are applied on a disk group basis. Compression-only vSAN is applied on a per-disk basis. |
| Data at rest encryption | vSAN provides data at rest encryption. Data is encrypted after all other processing, such as deduplication, is performed. Data at rest encryption protects data on storage devices, in case a device is removed from the cluster. |
| SDK support | The VMware vSAN SDK for Java is an extension of the VMware vSphere Management SDK. It includes documentation, libraries and code examples that help developers automate installation, configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting of vSAN. |
