vSAN 6.7 is here!

Today marks the release of vSAN version 6.7 along with vCenter and vSphere 6.7. The versions line up now across those three products which will make things a lot less confusing, so we are already off to a great start. There are many significant improvements to this version, and I was fortunate enough to be part of the blogger early access program to get a sneak peak at this release from the marketing team. I will go over a few things that they shared with us in this post.

HTML5 client integration for vSAN is almost at feature parity with the flex web client. vSAN workflows have been optimized for less clicks and a more efficient user experience. Support will still continue for the Flex web client, but new features going forward will only be available through the new HTML5 interface. This will be much nicer to have an interface free of the flash player, and it is very fast in comparison!

Native vROps dashboards for vSAN are now available in the vSphere Client. Quickly see the basics like health and more, or click to move to the vROps console for the full vSAN dashboard.

VMware Releases vSphere and vCenter 6.7

I was fortunate to be part of a blogger vExpert early access program and got to see the new product version before the launch. Having taken part in the vSphere beta for the past few years, I have been very much looking forward to this release. I was under embargo but can now share some of these things with you as that has been lifted as of today.

Installation

The Clarity UI is used for the installation. This is a nice new look for the installation and upgrade processes. One of the main benefits now is a browser and platform agnostic approach to the install.

Here are the supported upgrade paths, note that the path from 6.5U2 to 6.7 support is not live yet, but will be in the future. If you are currently on vSphere 5.5 you will need to upgrade to 6.0 to be able to get to 6.7. Another side note vSphere 5.5 support ends on September 19th so if you haven't already considered this now is the time! **NOTE** This is the last release for Windows based vCenter

vCenter improvements

vCSA migration now supports your current custom ports for services during the migration process if you have changed any of the default ports on your install these settings will be preserved on the new vCSA.

New and improved vCenter Appliance Management Interface (VAMI)

There is a new Monitoring screen, this screen will give much more detail

Resync Improvements in vSAN 6.6

Having seen some of the resync times in the past on vSAN 6.0 it was welcome news to hear about vSAN 6.6's ability to weigh which route was more expensive (in terms of rebuild time/data to sync) if a host was out and came back into a cluster, but I had never seen it for myself, until today. I am in the middle of working on a vSAN upgrade and I have to update the HBA firmware for my controllers. I switched to the N2215 HBA for my vSAN and need them on the VMware VCG supported firmware. The current firmware level is 9.00.02.00 and the VMware recommended versions in the vSAN Health Hardware Check, shows either 11.00.02.00 or 13.00.02.00 are supported.

I knew this upgrade was going to take a while with various firmware versions on the host needing to be upgraded. Firmware upgrades are notoriously slow due to the critical nature of the components. Many safety checks are in place to make sure things are working. In addition to the HBA firmware I also had UEFI firmware, DSA, IMM which is IBM/Lenovo speak for an out of band server management card. vSAN resync times were top of mind as I approached this update. To remedy this I knew that I wanted to increase the default vSAN resync time, which is 60 minutes when a host is absent from the cluster. There are a few ways this can be done, either GUI or CLI and I will show both methods here. In the web client you can go to the host level and choose Advanced System Settings and edit the value for VSAN.ClomRepairDelay,