What is vSAN ESA?

vSAN ESA will unlock the capabilities of modern hardware by adding optimization for high-performance, NVMe-based TLC flash devices with vSAN, building off vSAN’s Original Storage Architecture(vSAN OSA). vSAN was initially designed to deliver highly-performant storage with SATA/SAS devices, the most common storage media at the time. vSAN 8 will give our customers the freedom of choice to decide which of the two existing architectures (vSAN OSA or vSAN ESA) to leverage to best suit their needs.

vSAN Express Storage Architecture

This new architecture will showcase some innovative ways of processing and storing data. vSAN 8 with ESA will introduce structural changes like a new log-structured file system (vSAN LFS), a new write-optimized log-structured object manager, and a new object format. All these changes will help vSAN ESA achieve near device-level performance and store data and metadata in an extremely fast and efficient way.

vSAN 8 using either architecture

vSAN 8 with vSAN Express Storage Architecture will bring innovative updates that deliver supreme performance and efficiency levels, enhanced resilience, simplified operations, and ease of management. We believe the vSAN ESA can help our customers capitalize on the benefits of the latest generation of hardware to run the most demanding workloads with the highest levels of performance and efficiency.

Additional enhancements for vSAN in vSphere 8 Update 2:

• Integrated File Services for Cloud Native and Traditional Workloads.
• Improved Performance for Disaggregated Environments.
• New AF-0 ReadyNode profile for small deployments.
• Default Auto-Policy Intelligence for optimal vSAN SPBM policies.
• Improved Clarity with Cluster Capacity Reporting.
• Improved Security Through Enhanced Key Management.
• Intuitive Detection of VMs and Disks Consuming the Most Resources.
• Improved Detection of Performance Bottleneck in Stretched Clusters.
• Simplified configuration for 2-Node and Stretched Clusters.

vSAN Express Storage Architecture is ideal for all of our customers and cloud providers moving to this latest generation of hardware.  Delivering space-efficient and highly resilient storage without any performance compromise, using all claimed storage devices for capacity, and new compression enhancements significantly change the mathematics in favour of the vSAN ESA.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!