We continue to discuss the technological innovations presented at the VMware EMPOWER 2019 conference in Lisbon. Our materials on the topic on Habr:
Storage virtualization reaches a new level
The third day at VMware EMPOWER 2019 began with a review of the company's plans for the development of the vSAN product and other solutions for virtualizing storage systems (SAN). Specifically, the discussion focused on the update of vSAN 6.7 update 3.
vSAN is an integrated storage solution with vSphere, designed for deployment in private and public clouds. It allows for abstraction from hardware disks and the ability to work with resource pools without worrying about where the virtual machine data is stored. Starting with vSAN version 6.7, developers have taught the system to use infrastructure more effectively — the tool automatically frees up space, reducing the total cost of ownership of storage.
VMware representatives state that the new version of vSAN offers significantly improved input/output operation performance (by 20–30%) compared to its predecessor. The updated system also resolved some issues related to vMotion migration, replication, and snapshot processing. These operations have become much more stable — situations where virtual machine disks get 'stuck' during migration and lose changes during snapshot creation and deletion will occur much less frequently. The company's engineers promise to eliminate these issues entirely in future vSAN 6.7 updates.
Additionally, the IT giant is working on implementing full support for All-NVMe disk infrastructure and optimizing vSAN for SSD arrays. Among the priorities highlighted by the company's speakers are increasing performance and data protection in the event of SAN component failures. The first focus was on increasing the array rebuild speed, working with the Redirect-On-Write mechanism, and minimizing the number of disk operations among networked storage devices. Real-time data recovery between cluster nodes and minimizing latency were also mentioned.
vSAN is becoming smarter, integrating more intelligent features related to data location determination and route optimization during data transmission. These aspects are crucial for the operation of functions like DRS, vMotion, and others.
At the same time, AI systems are actively being integrated into the vSAN product. Its tasks include monitoring the health of disk subsystems, automatic 'healing', as well as notifying administrators and generating reports/recommendations.
On Data Recovery
At one of the panels during VMware EMPOWER 2019, speakers discussed the capabilities of the updated NSX-T 2.4, designed for network virtualization and aggregating data center virtual networks. The discussion focused on the platform's capabilities in the context of disaster recovery.
VMware is actively working on its own DR solutions in both single-site and multi-site environments. The company has managed to abstract virtual resources (machines, disks, networks) nearly entirely from physical platforms. NSX-T can already operate with multi-cloud, multi-hypervisor, and bare-metal nodes.
The tool reduces data recovery time and the number of manual operations associated with reconfiguring the infrastructure (IP addresses, security policies, routing, and service parameters) after migration to new hardware, when many technical conditions change.
Restoring all settings manually takes a long time, plus there is the human factor — a system administrator might forget or overlook several mandatory steps. Such errors can lead to failures in the operation of the entire IT infrastructure or individual services. Additionally, the human factor negatively impacts the achievement of availability and data recovery speed metrics ()»
For these reasons, VMware actively promotes the ideas of logical micro-segmentation of infrastructure, orchestration, and automation of recovery procedures. A special emphasis is placed on the implementation of AI systems. These are already appearing in IT giant solutions such as VMware NSX Cluster Management, Storage Replication, as well as virtual switches and tunnels based on the Geneve protocol. The latter has replaced NSX-V VXLAN and serves as the foundation for the operation of NSX-T.
The representatives of the company spoke about the smooth transition from VMware NSX-V to NSX-T . The main feature of the new solution is that it is not tied to vCenter/vSphere, so it can be used as a standalone solution for various types of infrastructure.
We visited special demo stands by VMware, where we were able to evaluate the performance of the aforementioned products in practice. It turned out that despite the wide functionality, managing SD-WAN and NSX-T solutions is quite simple. We managed to navigate everything "on the fly", without resorting to the help of consultants.
It is good that VMware pays attention to security and data recovery issues. Today, as a rule, third-party systems are responsible for their solution, which leads to compatibility issues (especially when changing infrastructure conditions) and additional costs for clients. The new VMware solutions will enhance the stability of processes occurring in the IT infrastructure.
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Source: habr.com
