vSAN 6.6, ESXi 6.5d, vCenter 6.5d and more Released

VMware has released vSAN 6.6 which is a part of vCenter 6.5d and ESXi 6.5d.

This is a very exciting new version of vSAN with many new features and enhancements.

vSAN 6.6

What’s New:

VMware Virtual SAN (vSAN) 6.6 introduces the following new features and enhancements:

• Unicast. In vSAN 6.6 and later releases, multicast is not required on the physical switches that support the vSAN cluster. If some hosts in your vSAN cluster are running earlier versions of software, a multicast network is still required. 
• Encryption. vSAN supports data-at-rest encryption of the vSAN datastore. When you enable encryption, vSAN performs a rolling reformat of every disk group in the cluster. vSAN encryption requires a trusted connection between vCenter Server and a key management server (KMS). The KMS must support the Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) 1.1 standard. 
• Enhanced stretched cluster availability with local fault protection. You can provide local fault protection for virtual machine objects within a single site in a stretched cluster. You can define a Primary level of failures to tolerate for the cluster, and a Secondary level of failures to tolerate for objects within a single site. When one site is unavailable, vSAN maintains availability with local redundancy in the available site.
  • Enhanced stretched cluster availability with local fault protection. You can provide local fault protection for virtual machine objects within a single site in a stretched cluster. Define a Primary level of failures to tolerate for the cluster, and a Secondary level of failures to tolerate for objects within a single site. When one site is unavailable, vSAN maintains availability with local redundancy in the available site.
  • Change witness host. You can change the witness host for a stretched cluster. On the Fault Domains and Stretched Cluster page, click Change witness host.
• Configuration Assist and Updates. You can use the Configuration Assist and Updates pages to check the configuration of your vSAN cluster, and resolve any issues.
  • Configuration Assist helps you verify the configuration of cluster components, resolve issues, and troubleshoot problems. Configuration checks are divided into categories, similar to those in the vSAN health service. The configuration checks cover hardware compatibility, network, and vSAN configuration options.
  • You can use the Updates page to update storage controller firmware and drivers to meet vSAN requirements. 
• Resynchronization throttling. You can throttle the IOPS used for cluster resynchronization. Use this control if latencies are rising in the cluster due to resynchronization, or if resynchronization traffic is too high on a host. 
• Health service enhancements. New and enhanced health checks for encryption, cluster membership, time drift, controller firmware, disk groups, physical disks, disk balance. Online health checks can monitor vSAN cluster health and send the data to the VMware analytics backend system for advanced analysis. You must participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program to use online health checks. 
• Host-based vSAN monitoring. You can monitor vSAN health and basic configuration through the ESXi host client. In the host client navigator, click vSAN. click the tabs to view vSAN information for the host. On the General tab, you can click Edit Settings to correct configuration issues at the host level. 
• Performance service enhancements. vSAN performance service includes statistics for networking, resynchronization, and iSCSI. You can select saved time ranges in performance views. vSAN saves each selected time range when you run a performance query. 
• vSAN integration with vCenter Server Appliance. You can create a vSAN cluster as you deploy a vCenter Server Appliance, and host the appliance on that cluster. The vCenter Server Appliance Installer enables you to create a one-host vSAN cluster, with disks claimed from the host. vCenter Server Appliance is deployed on the vSAN cluster.
• Maintenance mode enhancements. The Confirm Maintenance Mode dialog box provides information to guide your maintenance activities. You can view the impact of each data evacuation option. For example, you can check whether enough free space is available to complete the selected option. 
• Rebalancing and repair enhancements. Disk rebalancing operations are more efficient. Manual rebalancing operation provides better progress reporting.
  • Rebalancing protocol has been tuned to be more efficient and achieve better cluster balance. Manual rebalance provides more updates and better progress reporting.
  • More efficient repair operations require fewer cluster resynchronizations. vSAN can partially repair degraded or absent components to increase the Failures to tolerate even if vSAN cannot make the object compliant.
• Disk failure handling. If a disk experiences sustained high latencies or congestion, vSAN considers the device as a dying disk, and evacuates data from the disk. vSAN handles the dying disk by evacuating or rebuilding data. No user action is required, unless the cluster lacks resources or has inaccessible objects. When vSAN completes evacuation of data, the health status is listed as DyingDiskEmpty. vSAN does not unmount the failed device.
• New esxcli commands.
  • Display vSAN cluster health: esxcli vsan health
  • Display vSAN debug information: esxcli vsan debug

See the full release notes here: Release notes

vCenter 6.5d

This contains the vSAN 6.6 and bug fixes for vSAN.

See full release notes here: Release Notes

ESXi 6.5d

This contains the vSAN 6.6 and bug fixes for vSAN.

See full release notes here: Release notes

VMware vSphere Integrated Containers 1.1

• A unified OVA installer for all three components
• Upgrade from version 1.0
• Official support for vSphere Integrated Containers Management Portal
• A unified UI for vSphere Integrated Containers Registry and vSphere Integrated Containers Management Portal
• A plug-in for the HTML5 vSphere Client
• Support for Docker Client 1.13 and Docker API version 1.25
• Support for using Notary with vSphere Integrated Containers Registry
• Support for additional Docker commands. For the list of Docker commands that this release supports, see Supported Docker Commands in Developing Container Applications with vSphere Integrated Containers.

See the full release notes here: Release notes

Important note:

Please note that for vSAN users currently on 6.0 Update 3x – upgrade to vSAN 6.6 is NOT yet supported. 

See the upgrade path matrix here: Interopebility_matrix