VMware vSAN ESA leverages advances in storage and network technology to offer performance and manageability improvements over VMware vSAN OSA.
Figure 1. VMware vSAN data store based on VMware vSAN ESA
VMware vSAN encryption can be enabled on Day 1 during cluster deployment. By default, VMware vSAN encryption is disabled. Starting with VxRail 8.0.300, you can enable VMware vSAN encryption on Day 1, with also the option to enable or disable it as a Day 2 operation.
Both VMware vSAN OSA and VMware vSAN ESA use the drive slot storage devices to form the data store and the VMware vSAN network. Some of the features of VMware vSAN ESA are:
VMware vSAN ESA uses NVMe drives, higher CPU core counts, and high-speed networks to offer a simpler, more balanced design with higher overall performance.
Each VxRail node supporting a VMware vSAN ESA data store requires a minimum of 16 CPU cores and 128 GB memory.
Only compatible NVMe-based storage devices can be used as standard (SAS or SATA) SSD. Spinning disk drives are not supported.
The concept of disk groups as the data store building block is removed with VMware vSAN ESA.
VMware vSAN ESA is based on the foundation of storage pools where all storage devices operate independently when contributing to the pool.
VMware vSAN ESA architecture provides more flexibility, resilience to hardware failure, efficiency with a new log-structured file system, and better performance.
You can enable VMware ESA deployments with moderate performance needs and smaller data centers or edge environments.
Object availability enforcement in a VMware vSAN storage policy is similar in both VMware vSAN ESA and VMware vSAN OSA, in that the setting dictates the number of copies to maintain across storage devices while VMware vSAN ESA also moves compression from a data store level setting to a per object or VM option enabling it by default.
For more information about VMware vSAN versions, see the
VMware vSAN technical page.
Consider the following VMware vSAN ESA license requirements:
VMware vSAN ESA requires either a VMware vSAN Advanced, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus Edition license. ELA also supports VMware vSAN+ licenses.
An existing and compatible license for VMware vSAN on VMware vSphere 7 can be transferred to VMware vSAN ESA on vSphere 8 through the VMware licensing portal.
VMware vSphere 8 license is required for each VxRail node.
A VMware vCenter Server 8 license is required for VMware vCenter Server instances supporting a VxRail cluster running VMware vSAN ESA.
While deploying a VMware vSAN ESA cluster, consider the following:
VMware vSAN ESA supports VxRail-managed VMware vCenter Server and customer-managed VMware vCenter Server.
VxRail 8.0 (vSphere 8.0) supports both VMware vSAN OSA and VMware vSAN ESA.
Upgrade customer-managed VMware vCenter Server to version 8 to support a VxRail cluster running VxRail 8.0. VMware vCenter Server running version 8 supports VxRail clusters running VMware vSAN ESA. For more information about the interoperability matrix for VxRail and customer-managed VMware vCenter Server, see the
VxRail and external vCenter interoperability matrix.
LCM
When upgrading VMware vSAN ESA, consider the following:
VxRail LCM upgrades both vSAN ESA and vSAN OSA.
Upgrading from a VMware vSAN OSA data store to a VMware vSAN ESA data store is not supported.
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