Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

Today, I will talk to you about the example analysis of the new features of vSphere 7 external storage, which may not be well understood by many people. in order to make you understand better, the editor has summarized the following for you. I hope you can get something according to this article.

Let's take a look at the feature enhancements related to vSphere 7 docking with other external storage. I think storage vendors pay more attention to this. After all, if you pay attention to vSAN, you can only learn what other people do, because vSAN and storage vendors are competitive. However, many VMware scenarios use third-party storage (advantages include separate deployment, independent expansion, and support for multi-hypervisor, etc.), you need to understand the core storage features of vSphere, so that you can combine your own storage products to provide customers with better VMware scenario solutions.

VSphere now supports Fabric-based NVMe, allowing connections to external NVMe arrays using FC and RDMA (RoCE v2).

This feature is good because there are more and more front-end arrays that support NVMeoF. FC school is adopted mainly by NetApp, while RoCE v2 school is mainly promoted by Pure Storage and so on. VSphere 7 can now take advantage of these NVMe arrays.

Use NVMeoF,Target to present to the host as a Namespace in the form of Active/Active or asymmetric access Mode (ALUA), which is the equivalent of SCSI LUN.

If you use FC connection, you need the FC HBA card of the EXSi host to support NVMe, and the configuration is automatic.

If you use RoCE v2, you need to do more configuration and lossless Ethernet.

It should be noted that NVMeoF does not support the commonly used NMP multipathing plug-in, but requires HPP.

Also, the number of Namespace is 32, and each Namespace only supports 4 paths. Large-scale scenes may not be enough.

No one really likes RDM, but in many cases, clustered applications require RDM. Another way to migrate from RDM has been added in the new version. VMFS6 with vSphere 7 now supports SCSI-3 persistent retention. You can now migrate Microsoft WSFC to VMFS using a FC connection.

Note that there are some limitations to this feature, such as only supporting FC and not supporting third-party multipath protocol plug-ins. This limitation may limit many SDS vendors because most SDS vendors do not support FC interfaces. But there are also individual SDS vendors that support the FC protocol, such as XSKY, which can support FC in both SDS all-in-one and pure software products.

Other restrictions include support for only five WSFC nodes, which is consistent with the specification of pRDM.

Also, storage value-added features such as snapshots and clones are not supported. However, storage itself generally has these features, and vSphere is not necessarily required to do this work.

Thick backup disk or thin backup disk has always been and has been the topic of discussion, and each kind of disk has its own advantages and disadvantages. The most common disadvantage of thin configuration is the overhead of writing unused space for the first time. With the new Affinity Manager, you can reduce this impact by creating an area map of available resources, thus avoiding looking for free space back and forth between the file system and the Resource Manager.

This is the original architecture of Affinity 1.0. When allocating space, a large number of ATS disk locking operations are required, and the performance is not good.

After switching to the Affinity 2.0 architecture, the disk space is divided into multiple Region, which is then managed through Region Map. As a result, the overhead required for first-time writes on metadata IO and thin set-up disks is reduced. It can also improve space allocation for EZT or LZT settings.

The growth and adoption of vVols is increasing, and customers are asking for support in many other VMware solutions. In vSphere 7, significant progress has been made in getting vVol supported by other products.

VVol now supports SRM 8.3, which makes disaster recovery management easier.

As mentioned earlier in the new features of vSAN, CNS also supports vVol. It is more convenient for cloud native scenarios to use external storage. However, in this version, the snapshot and replication capabilities of vVol are not supported.

Also, vVols is supported in vRealize Operations 8.1.

For VCF, VMware currently does not provide official support for vVol, but storage partners can. Supporting vVol as supplementary storage is a partner-supported option.

However, although the function of vVol is becoming more and more powerful, and it has been adopted more and more abroad, I personally think that the adoption rate in China is not high. I think it is mainly due to the general ability of domestic storage to support vVol, so I don't like to promote this feature.

After reading the above, do you have any further understanding of the example analysis of the new features of vSphere 7 external storage? If you want to know more knowledge or related content, please follow the industry information channel, thank you for your support.

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