Waiting is over. Fire up your download engines and get VMware vSphere8 binaries.
The wait has been rewarded. After the announcement at VMware Explore 2022 in North America, the installer files are now available on the VMware Portal (login required).
VMware has updated the application process for the vExpert program. The application is now possible all year round. Only during the selection process the portal will be closed for about 2 weeks. This is usually in February for the first half of the year and in the July/August area for the second half of the year.
This article is a result of questions that are asked frequently by my students in vSAN classes. The subject of striping sounds very simple at first, but it turns out to be quite complex once you start going away from the simple standard examples. We shed light on the striping behavior of vSAN objects in mirroring, erasure coding, and for large objects. We also show the different striping behavior before vSAN 7 Update 1 and after.
What is striping?
Striping generally refers to a technique in which logically sequential data is segmented in such a way that successive segments are stored on different physical storage devices. Striping does not create redundancy. In fact, the opposite is true. In traditional storage, striping is also referred to as RAID 0 (note: RAID 0 -> zero redundancy). By distributing the segments over several devices that can be accessed in parallel, the overall data throughput is increased while latency is reduced.
Stripe size or stripe width is the number of segments an object is split into.
With a stripe width of 2, an object of 100 GB, for example, is split into two components of 50 GB each and distributed across two storage devices. This corresponds to a RAID 0.
This blogpost was under embargo until 28th of September 2021 8:00am (PT) / 17:00 (CEST). The fact that you can read this now means that vSphere 7 Update 3 has (probably) already been released.
[Update 29th Sept 2021]: Download is not yet available. Maybe we need to wait until VMworld2021 next week.
What’s New
VMware vSphere 7 Update3 comes with a wide range of innovations. They can be categorized into the sections below:
Tanzu with Kubernetes
Lifecycle, Upgrade and Patching
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
Resource Management
Availability & Resiliency
Security & Compliance
Guest OS and Workloads
Storage
Networking
vSphere Management & APIs
Another bunch of features goes into vSAN. But these features will be covered in an extra post.