VMware vSAN HCI Mesh is Now Cloud Director-Ready

Introduced with VMware vSAN 7 Update 1, HCI Mesh is a new feature that allows disaggregation of compute and storage resources. HCI Mesh connects individual vSAN clusters and enables utilization of stranded (unused) capacity across clusters. With this cross-cluster architecture for datastore sharing, one or more vSAN datastores can be remotely mounted to other vSAN clusters within vCenter.

Increase Storage Utilization and Optimize Costs

With HCI Mesh, remote vSAN datastores can act as local datastores when applications demand more storage capacity. With this capability, cloud providers are able to achieve much higher resource utilization and cost optimization with the ability to pool storage resources from their distributed datacenters and allocate where needed. With the added flexibility and scalability, providers can now avoid installing more local capacity and utilize unused storage across multiple clusters.

Utilizing storage across clusters can also enable vSAN-based storage tiers for customers. Highest performance vSAN cluster storage can be presented as a Gold tier storage policy and older vSAN cluster storage can be presented as a Silver tier storage policy.

VMware Cloud Director now supports HCI Mesh

We are thrilled to announced that VMware Cloud Director has now been fully tested with HCI Mesh and now supports VMware vSAN HCI Mesh in cloud providers’ multi-tenant environments.

Since VMware Cloud Director converts physical resource such as network, storage and compute within a data centre into elastic Provider Virtual Data Centers (pVDC), cloud providers can assign or share resources from a pVDC to one to many Organization VDCs (org VDC) for customers. For offering cloud resource services adequately, the storage/compute/network should be utilized to the maximum extent. 

VMware vSAN HCI Mesh creates a network of multiple vSAN datastores and helps optimize usage of underutilized storages spread across multiple clusters. In VMware Cloud Director, some of the VDC‘s compute resources might be underutilized because of lack of corresponding storage availability. So to overcome storage scarcity and make use of compute resource to optimal capacity, the underutilized vSAN datastores from other clusters can be used. This can be done by attaching remote datastores to clusters (which have underutilized compute resources) with the help of VMware vSAN HCI Mesh. Storage policies tagged with these remote data stores can be consumed by VMware Cloud Director’s VDCs in order to offer more robust storage/compute services. 

VMware Cloud Director engineers tested remote datastore storage policies attached to a Provider VDC and Org VDC with underutilized resources. A workload was then successfully provisioned based on those storage policies and utilized the available storage resources. 

Get started with HCI Mesh

In order to use HCI Mesh, vSAN 7U1 is required and providers must have vSAN Enterprise enabled and licensed for local and remote clusters. Please refer to the vSAN FAQ for additional considerations for HCI Mesh.

For more information, check out the following resources: