On September 2015 VMware released VSAN 6.1. VMware has just announced the newest version of VSAN - 6.2 (I think it will be released in March)! VMware really works hard to improve VSAN...
This version provides some long-awaited features and improvements as follows:
- Space efficiency - deduplication (fixed block 4KB) and compression (after deduplication, only block than can be compressed under 2KB). Blocks are deduplicated when de-staging from cache tier to capacity tier as shown on the below figure. This feature is enabled on a cluster level, available for all flash VSAN only and is supported with stretch clusters and ROBO edition - features introduced in VSAN 6.1.
- RAID-5 (FTT=1) and RAID-6 (FTT=2) Erasure Coding - saving around 30% space and available only for all flash VSAN.
- VSAN Quality of Service (QOC) - per VMDK IOP limits.
- Support for pure IPv6.
- Software checksum (CRC32 algorithm is used). Two level of scrubbing: component and object levels scrubbings.
- Client Cache.
- Sparse Swap - an advanced host level option to enable the reclaiming of space dedicated to memory. Useful for VDI.
- Enhanced VSAN performance and capacity monitoring.
- Enhanced Health service.
Update 15.03.2016: VMware released VSAN 6.2. For more information, please follow the Release Notes.
