vSphere 8 and vSAN 8 What you need to know!

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With VMware Explore in US, vSphere 8 and vSAN 8 are both announced. However, do note that not to get confused announcement is on the release but it's not generally available. So you cannot download them till generally available.

The general available date is to be 28th Oct as stated with all the announcement for all the new infrastructure offering here.

vSphere 8

To give you a technical overview of vSphere 8, do check out this site. In vSphere 8, the biggest feature that was release is the support for Distributed Services Engine also known as Data Processing Unit (DPU) or SmartNICs as a hardware or as Project Monterey which was announced 2 years ago.

With the initial release, only NSX services will be offloaded to the DPU. The plan was to have vSAN and ESXIO to be part of the DPU. Which then will be able to provide NSX and vSAN services to not just vSphere environment but also to all x86 servers running Windows and Linux. To find out more, try it out on HOL.

Also with this release, there are some enhancement for core storage support. Read them up here.


vSAN 8

With the new release of vSAN 8 aka Project Andes, there is definitely a major release. That is no other than the Express Storage Architecture (source). This change the way how vSAN construct on the storage layout prior to version 8.

One good site you should bookmark and read more of vSAN 8 is here.

Now you might have some questions in mind. Here are some common questions asked:

Will vSAN 8 replace any version prior to this release?
No. You can treat vSAN 8 as vSAN 2.0. It will run with the version before treating them as vSAN 1.0.

Can I run both vSAN 8 and before together?
Yes. They can be managed by the same vCenter Server however, each vSAN type have to be in their own cluster. You can run "vSAN 1.0" in one cluster and "vSAN 2.0" in another.

Can I use the same hardware for vSAN 8?
Maybe. You need to check the new vSAN 8 HCL to be sure. vSAN 8 does support and require new hardware.

Will there be a migration tool or is this a direct upgrade?
If you intend to use vSAN 8, as long your hardware is supported, you can do a direct upgrade there is no migration needed.

Is vSAN 8 feature parity with prior vSAN?
Not at the current initial release. I believe this will be updated to be feature parity in future release. One example is vSAN 8 does not HCI Mesh and File Services.


Hope this give you a round up for vSphere 8 and vSAN 8. I will update any new findings.

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