VSAN 6.1 was released with the update of VMware vSphere 6.0 U1. It is the third release of VSAN and gets some really cool new functions, which could be interesting for enterprises.

  • vSphere FT Support
  • Clustering Support
  • Two Node Solution (ROBO)
  • VSAN Stretched Cluster!

vSphere FT Support

  • With the new release of VSAN 6.1 vSphere FT is fully supported on VSAN.
  • The only requirement is 10Gb network.
  • Stretched Cluster is not supported, but placing the copy to a separate fault domain is possible.

Clustering Support

  • Support for Microsoft Exchange Cluster (DAG) and SQL Always-On Cluster was added. These Clustes must use the file share witness, the failover clustering instance (FCI) is not supported.
  • Oracle Real Application Cluster is fully supported.

Two Node Solution (ROBO)

If you need redundant storage on a remote site the Two Node Solution could help you. You need two nodes (ESXi with local storage) on the remote site and one node as witness node. A witness node is a “simple” ESXi VM. The latency must be less than 500ms (which should be possible ;) )

VSAN Stretched Cluser

With VSAN 6.1 VMware brings support for stretched cluster scenarios. Now it is possible to build an active-active cluster with nearly no downtime of VMs and no data loss if one site goes down. VSAN Stretched Cluster need a witness, which is responsible for quorum and voting mechanism. The witness is a simple ESXi VM like it is for the Two Node Solution. It is possible to use vCloud to host the witness appliance.

On network layer you need

  • 10 Gb network (40 Gb is also possible)
  • 5 ms latency
  • Witness appliance need 100 Mb and 100 ms latency