VMware vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive

We live in an unprecedented time of technology disruptions that are reshaping many aspects of our lives. Every business in every industry is becoming a
digital business. This in turn is driving a significant shift in how IT delivers infrastructure and services. As software business applications become the
foundation for new digital business models, IT infrastructure needs to evolve to become scalable, secure, easy to operate, fully programmable and service
oriented. This can be accomplished only when infrastructure itself becomes software-defined.
VMware pioneered the concept of the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) in 2012 and is the first in building a full SDDC that virtualizes all aspects of
the infrastructure – compute, network, and storage, with automation and intrinsic security built in. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has emerged as an
architecture of choice to build the SDDC. Gartner  (reference 1: Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Nov 27, 2018) defines HCI as “a
category of scale-out software-integrated infrastructure that applies a modular approach to compute, network and storage on standard hardware, leveraging
distributed, horizontal building blocks under unified management.”
VMware’s journey in HCI started in 2014 with the introduction of VMware vSAN. vSAN is a natively integrated, software-defined storage solution that is
uniquely embedded in the hypervisor and delivers flash-optimized, high-performance storage for any application. This comes at a fraction of the cost of
traditional, purpose-built storage and other less efficient HCI solutions. vSAN is designed as a true software-based HCI that is delivered as software that
supports all major server vendors. Over the years, we have been relentlessly innovating in vSAN, making it a high performance, enterprise class storage
platform with a rich set of data services. We have also extended the scope of VMware HCI in a number of ways. The first is by expanding our HCI
consumption models from software to fully integrated appliances such as VxRail and VxRack, to HCI-as-a-service. The second is by expanding from
integrated virtualized compute and storage only to the full software defined datacenter stack, namely the VMware Cloud Foundation. Another way we are
extending the scope is by expanding vSAN from on-premises datacenters, to the edge, and to the cloud.
In the meantime, we are excited to see our customers embrace HCI as a mainstream datacenter architecture powering their business-critical applications.
With more than 17,000 customers, including more than 50% of the Global 2000, VMware HCI powered by vSAN is the industry’s most adopted HCI
solution. It is used by customers globally in all industry verticals, for a broad set of use cases including business critical applications, remote office and
edge, disaster recovery, virtual desktops, and cloud native applications. I have spoken to many customers who have a “vSAN-first” policy, making vSAN
the first choice for their storage needs, and customers who have built their entire data centers on vSAN based HCI.
Besides on-premises adoptions, there are also more than 500 cloud providers, including the world’s largest cloud providers like AWS and IBM, who
deliver HCI-as-a-service, built with our software, to their customers.
Thanks to our engineering team’s relentless focus on innovation and customer experience, and thanks to our customers’ enthusiasm and trust, VMware is
now a leader in HCI, and vSAN has been the fastest growing business for VMware in the past 2 years, having experienced a 10x hyper-growth in less than
3 years.
It is hard to believe that we have now launched seven major editions of vSAN. Given our large user base and especially a growing expert user base, a
vSAN Deep Dive book is much needed. Over my tenure as an engineering leader then business leader for vSAN,
I have interacted with all the key architects and engineers for the product. Duncan and Cormac stood out as two exceptional technologists, who not only
have an expert level understanding of the architecture and technology, but can also masterfully translate their knowledge to help customers’ real-world
deployments and operations. I am also impressed by their ability to articulate complex technical concepts with simplicity and clarity. In fact, I have often
leveraged their blogs and videos as my source of technical learning.
Thank you for your interest in vSAN and VMware HCI, and I am confident that the learnings from this book will help you with your infrastructure
modernization journey.
Yanbing Li, Ph.D
Senior Vice President and General ManagerStorage and Availability, VMware