Unpacking Storage In VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

VMware vSAN as a part of VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 brings new functionality that not only extends its capabilities in ways never seen before, but also integrates into VCF in a manner that makes it a natural and cohesive extension. vSAN is clearly the premier storage solution for VMware Cloud Foundation. Broadcom’s John Nicholson will take you through the latest storage innovations, and how they deliver enhanced TCO and flexibility, secure and resilient storage, multi-site operations, and a storage platform for all workloads.

John Nicholson from Broadcom detailed the storage enhancements in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, focusing on improvements to operations, disaster recovery, performance, and security. He highlighted new operational consoles and tools for multi-site management, including diagnostics capabilities and IO Insight for workload analysis. The presentation included a demo showcasing the IO Trip Analyzer for end-to-end IO path troubleshooting and discussed the overhead of VSCSI tracing.

A key feature discussed was the new cluster-wide global deduplication for vSAN ESA, which uses a 4K fixed block granularity and is performed asynchronously to minimize impact on write performance. Nicholson addressed concerns about encrypted storage, emphasizing that vSAN offers data-at-rest and data-in-transit encryption to meet compliance requirements while still enabling compression and deduplication where possible. The presentation also covered support for multiple vSAN deployment types, including single-site clusters, disaggregated storage clusters, and imported clusters, along with the ability to split networking for vSAN storage clusters.

Nicholson also presented vSAN to vSAN replication, enhancing data protection by integrating with VMware Live Recovery (formerly Site Recovery Manager). He showed how this combined solution supports replication, disaster recovery, and ransomware protection, all managed through a single appliance. He also covered improvements in stretch cluster support, like site-based maintenance mode and forced recovery takeover. The presentation concluded with a discussion about the current state of storage technology, highlighting the cost-effectiveness and scalability of NVMe drives and the benefits of vSAN within the VMware ecosystem.