VxRail 7.0.100 started shipping last month on November 10th, and it comes with a bunch of cool new features that I will quickly touch on in this post. Now you maybe asking yourself “How did VxRail go from version 4.5 to 7.0?” Well, it seems like in the interest of simplicity, Dell has pulled a iPhone 9 and skipped versions 5 and 6 to align the VxRail code version with vSphere. So now instead of VxRail 4.5 running vSphere 6.5, VxRail 7.0.100 is running vSphere 7.0 U1. This includes all the new features that come with vSphere 7.0 U1 like vSphere with Tanzu, new vSAN features like HCI Mesh, Shared Witness and Efficient Spare Capacity Management, and enhanced vSAN features all leading to significant performance gains for VxRail. There is also a synchronous release of VxRail 4.5.451 for anyone not ready to move to 7.0 but that doesn’t get any of these cool new features so we won’t be talking about that here.
Here are some one the quick hit updates that came with this latest release to VxRail:
- This is a synchronous release of VMware vSphere 7.0 U1.
- Introduces VMware vSphere with Tanzu, the fastest way to get started with Kubernetes. This provides all the benefits of running VMware HCI software, while offering a choice of network architecture. At this time, Tanzu licenses can only be purchased directly from VMware.
- New and enhanced vSAN features include:
- HCI Mesh – Provides the ability to utilize stranded storage capacity across vSAN clusters to optimize infrastructure utilization.
- Shared Witness for 2-Node Clusters – Provides the ability for a single witness host to support sixty-four 2-node clusters for reduced administration time and infrastructure costs associated with 2-node clusters.
- Efficient Spare Capacity Management – Provides a predictive way to calculate slack space for vSAN operations delivering better capacity utilization, improving total cost of ownership.
- Secure Disk Wipe – Provides the ability to securely wipe disks prior to decommissioning or reusing a disk.
- Compression only option – Provides the ability to configure compression only in addition to the existing compression and dedupe at a cluster level, delivering improvements performance in latency, predictability, throughput and resynch times.
- Includes support for VxRail Supplied VDS configurations to support system traffic across both NDC and PCIe NICs.
- Significant across the board vSAN performance improvements including:
- RAID5 and 6 showing the most gains, resulting in a narrowing of the performance gap with RAID1
- Compression only data service has significantly less impact on performance compared with deduplication and compression making it a viable space saving option for many production workloads that typically cannot take advantage of deduplication techniques, including: OLTP and VDI
- Compression only does not have the diskgroup fault domain disadvantage of deduplication or the drive rebuild performance penalty.
- RAID5 with Compression only in 7.0.100 can perform better than RAID1 in 7.0.0, meaning a simple LCM upgrade can unlock additional capacity and performance
- Includes support for AMD-based systems on VxRail 7.0.x.
- Includes BIOS 2.8.2