We continue to discuss the technological innovations presented at the VMware EMPOWER 2019 conference in Lisbon. Our materials on the topic on HabrΓ©:
Storage virtualization goes to the next level
The third day at VMware EMPOWER 2019 began with an analysis of the company's plans for the development of the vSAN product and other solutions for virtualization of storage systems (SHD). In particular, it was about updating vSAN 6.7 update 3.
vSAN is vSphere-integrated storage designed to be deployed in private and public clouds. It allows you to abstract from hardware disks and work with resource pools without worrying about where the virtual machine data is located. Starting with vSAN 6.7, developers have taught the system to use the infrastructure more efficiently - the tool automatically frees up space, reducing the total cost of storage ownership.
VMware says the new version of vSAN has 20% to 30% better I/O performance than its predecessor. Also in the updated system, some of the problems associated with vMotion migration, replication, and working with snapshots were solved. These operations have become much more stable - now situations with "sticky" disks of virtual machines during migration and loss of changes during the creation and deletion of snapshots will be much less common. The company's engineers promise to completely eradicate them in the next vSAN 6.7 updates.
The IT giant is also working on introducing full-featured support for All-NVMe disk infrastructure and optimizing vSAN for working with SSD arrays. Among the priorities, the company's speakers identified performance improvement and data protection in case of failure of storage elements. First of all, it was about increasing the speed of array rebuilding, working with the Redirect-On-Write mechanism and general minimization of the number of disk operations between media on the network. Also mentioned was online data recovery between cluster nodes and minimizing delays.
βvSAN is getting smarter, with more and more intelligent features related to data location and route optimization in transit. These aspects are important for the operation of features such as DRS, vMotion, etc.β
At the same time, artificial intelligence systems are being actively introduced into the vSAN product. Its tasks include monitoring the status of disk subsystems, their automatic "treatment", as well as notifying administrators and compiling reports / recommendations.
About data recovery
At one of the VMware EMPOWER 2019 panels, speakers separately discussed the capabilities of the updated NSX-T 2.4, designed for network virtualization and aggregation of virtual networks of data centers. It was about the capabilities of the platform in the context of emergency data recovery (Disaster Recovery).
VMware is actively working on its own DR solutions in single-site and multi-site environments. The company managed to almost completely abstract virtual resources (machines, disks, networks) from physical platforms. NSX-T already knows how to work with multi-cloud, multi-hypervisor and bare-metal nodes.
The tool reduces data recovery time and the number of manual operations associated with infrastructure reconfiguration (IP addresses, security policies, routing, and service settings) after migration to new equipment, when many technical conditions change.
βRestoring all settings manually takes a long time, plus there is a human factor - a system administrator can forget or ignore a number of mandatory steps. Such errors lead to failures in the operation of the entire IT infrastructure or individual services. Also, the human factor negatively affects the achievement of indicators of availability and speed of data recovery () "
For these reasons, VMware is actively promoting the ideas of logical micro-segmentation of infrastructure, orchestration and automation of recovery procedures. Particular emphasis is placed on the introduction of artificial intelligence systems. They already appear in such IT giant solutions 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 is the foundation upon which NSX-T is built.
Representatives of the company told about a smooth transition from VMware NSX-V to NSX-T . The main feature of the new solution is the fact 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 VMware demo stands, where we were able to evaluate the work of the above products in practice. It turned out that despite the wide functionality, managing SD-WAN and NSX-T solutions is quite simple. We managed to deal with everything "on the fly", without resorting to the help of consultants.
It's good that VMware pays attention to tasks related to security and data recovery. Today, third-party systems are usually responsible for their solution, which leads to compatibility problems (especially when infrastructure conditions change) and additional costs on the part of customers. New VMware solutions will increase the stability of processes occurring in the IT infrastructure.
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Source: habr.com