At VMware Explore Las Vegas 2023, VMware announced a new offering from the vSAN family: “vSAN Max“.
vSAN Max is now generally available to support the storage needs of your more demanding applications running on vSphere clusters.
Following the recent acquisition of VMware by Broadcom, the portfolio has now been simplified with 2 major offerings: VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF).
vSAN can now be leveraged through VCF or as an add-on with VMware vSphere Foundation.
For more information about these new offerings, please follow the link below.
VMware by Broadcom Dramatically Simplifies Offer Lineup and Licensing Model
What is vSAN Max Again?
vSAN Max offers new disaggregated storage capabilities built on vSAN Express Storage Architecture.
But don’t get me wrong, you might be thinking that vSAN Max is similar to HCI mesh. Well, both have some similarities but are different and don’t serve the same purpose.
About vSAN Max
A vSAN Max cluster is used as shared storage to serve vSphere Clusters with no storage. It can provide unprecedented performance and efficiency for intensive workloads while optimizing resource utilization and lowering costs.
Note also that you cannot run virtual machines on vSAN Max clusters Nodes. By taking that approach, your vSphere clusters can dedicate all their resources to run your workloads while your vSAN Max clusters focus on storage only.
About HCI Mesh
HCI Mesh is like vSAN Max a disaggregation technology.
With HCI Mesh enabled, vSAN client clusters can remotely mount datastore from vSAN server clusters.
vSphere Clusters without vSAN will also have the capability to mount datastore from vSAN server clusters.
HCI Mesh is great for improving the storage-compute ratio, for license optimization, but also giving the choice to your client cluster to benefit from different types of storage classes.
To learn more about HCI Mesh, please visit my older blog post here.
Wrap up
vSAN Max is a very promising offering to provide great performance as well as a huge amount of storage capacity to your vSphere clusters. I’m sure that more features will come at a later time so please stay tuned.
To learn more about vSAN max, feel free to visit this dedicated section on VMware Tech Zone blog here. Don’t hesitate to share this blog post if you like it 😃.