VCF 9 vSAN ESA Deep Dive: Architecture, Performance, and New Features
Introduction vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) is the recommended storage architecture for all new VMware Cloud Foundation 9 deployments. ESA represents a ground-up redesign of the vSAN storage stack, purpose-built to exploit the performance characteristics of modern NVMe flash media. In this post, we explore the vSAN ESA architecture, design decisions, VCF 9.1’s new Auto-RAID capability, and best practices for storage policy design. Architectural Overview The diagram below illustrates the vSAN ESA architecture in a VCF 9 environment, from the NVMe hardware layer through the vSAN data path and management plane: ...