No RDMs!

With the release of vSphere 6.7, there are some great new core storage functionalities. In fact, VMware’s vSphere 6.7 is the largest core storage release to date! Among some of the new features include PMEM (NVDIMMs) support, configurable rate for automatic UNMAP, UNMAP for SESparse snapshots, and support for 4Kn HDDs. There was also some great enhancements added to VVols.

The Trim/UNMAP functionality has nicely matured and works very well. I’ve tested the rate and the SESparse reclamation and both work well and without any interaction required. For those with thin provisioned datastores, the new automatic functionality certainly has the capability to get back some of that space that has slow be used up, so to speak.

PMEM has great potential for highly accelerating key storage for functioning for functions like SQl or other databases that can take advantage of near DRAM speeds and latency. With PMEM, it can be used as a datastore or, with supported GOS, you can pass a vNVDIMM directly to the GOS!

One of the best enhancements is to vVols. In addition to IPV6 end-to-end and TLS 1.2, is the support for SCSI-3 Persistent Reservations. What does this mean? Well for may clustered servers, they require shared disks which are managed by the server’s GOS themselves. Until now, this usually required RDMs which greatly reduce many of the great virtualization features we like to use. Now that VVols supports SCSI-3 locking, you no longer have to use RDMs! This has been tested and it works amazing! Now you can use all the virtualization features a normal VM has access. No more RDMs! This was one of the last holdouts for many who were forced to use RDMs. 

For more details on the release, take a look over at Storagehub on the release.