I was with one of our large EMEA customers last week, and we talked quite a bit about the evolution of vSAN. This customer is already one of our larger vSAN customers with very many clusters, and many, many nodes. They have also been a great vSAN reference for us, having first deployed the initial vSAN 5.5 release. One point that hit home was that they found it was quite difficult to determine the various features and enhancements that were introduced in each vSAN release. They mentioned that having a quick reference would be useful as they could use it to find out which release they should aim for, and also justify upgrade activities to the business. With that in mind, I decided to compose a list of big-ticket items associated with each release of vSAN. I will try to keep this up to date with upcoming releases as well. Hope you find it useful. I believe this captures the major features, but if you spot something that I missed, please let me know.

vSAN 7.0 (vSphere 7.0)

Link to vSAN 7.0 Release Notes

Build number 15843807 (24 APR 2020).

Integrated Native File Services (NFS File Shares) – more details

Read-Write-Many Persistent Volumes via CSI-CNS and vSAN 7 – more details

vSAN Memory performance metric now displayed – more details

Shared disks with multi-writer flag no longer need to be Easy Zero Thick on vSAN 7

Support for larger 32TB physical storage devices

Support for larger 1PB Logical capacity when deduplication and compression enabled

Objects immediately repaired when Witness Appliance replaced

NVMe hot-plug support

vSAN 6.7U3 (vSphere 6.7U3)

Link to vSAN 6.7U3 Release Notes

Build number 14320388 (20 AUG 2019).

Cloud Native Storage

Native SCSI-3 PGR for Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) support

Improved Capacity Usage views (including block container volumes)

Improved Resync insights – ability to see queued but not yet active resyncs

Maintenance Mode/Data Migration pre-checks

Online iSCSI LUN Resize

Improved destage performance with LSOM enhancements

Parallel resync operations

vsantop command line too for performance monitoring

More detailed information on vSAN 6.7U3 available here.

vSAN 6.7U1 (vSphere 6.7U1)

Link to vSAN 6.7 Release Notes

Build number 10302608 (31 OCT 2018).

TRIM/UNMAP Support

VMWare Update Manager (VUM) integration for Storage Controller Firmware Updates

Maintenance Mode Enhancements and Safeguards

New Proactive Network Performance test

Historic Capacity Reporting

Cluster Creation Quickstart Workflow

New Global Advanced Options

More detailed information on vSAN 6.7U1 available here.

vSAN 6.7 (vSphere 6.7)

Link to vSAN 6.7 Release Notes

Build number 8169922 (17 APR 2018).

Full support for HTML5 client

vRealize Operations support with vSAN license

vSAN iSCSI support for Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC)

Improved Quality of Service on vSAN resync traffic

Thin provisioned Swap objects

Swap objects adhering to policy settings rather than defaulting to RAID-1

Witness Traffic Separation support for vSAN Stretched Clusters

Fast Failover for vSAN redundant networks (previously waited for TCP timeouts)

Support for Shared-Nothing architectures via host/data locality (RPQ only)

4Kn (native) device support

More detailed information on vSAN 6.7 is available here.

vSAN 6.6.1 (vSphere 6.5U1)

Link to vSAN 6.6.1 Release Notes

Build number 5969303 (27 JUL 2017)

Integration with VUM, VMware Update Manager (including health checks)

vSAN Performance Diagnostics

Improved vCenter and unicast behaviour for cluster membership

Improved Device Serviceability – blinking drives LEDs on new controllers

More detailed information on vSAN 6.6.1 is available here.

vSAN 6.6 (vSphere 6.5.0d aka 6.5 EP2)



Link to vSAN 6.6 Release Notes

Build number 5310538 (18 APR 2017)

vSAN Data At Rest Encryption (DARE)

Local Protection in vSAN Stretched Cluster deployments

Site Affinity with FTT=0 in vSAN Stretched Cluster deployments

Unicast support to replace multicast

More visibility, via UI, into object placement

Smart Rebuilds which removed unnecessary duplication of resync traffic

Partial Repairs so that even when a whole object cannot be repaired, vSAN will repair some of the components

Optimized deduplication and checksum operations leading to improved performance

Manual resync throttling introduced

Maintenance mode pre-checks

Disk group / disk removal pre-checks

Easy Install and Config Assist features

Online/Cloud Health checks introduced for bespoke notifications and recommendations

Partial support for HTML5

Degraded Disk Handling (v2) enhanced with intelligent evacuation logic

IOPS Limit (QoS) made available to all license versions

More detailed information on vSAN 6.6 is available here.

Note: Direct upgrade from vSphere 6.0 Update 3 to vSphere 6.5.0d and vSAN 6.6 is not supported.

vSAN 6.5 (vSphere 6.5)



Link to vSAN 6.5 Release Notes

Build number 4564106 (26 NOV 2016)

All-Flash vSAN made available to all license versions

iSCSI support – ability to configure vSAN as iSCSI target

Support for 2 node direct connect configurations – no need for physical switch

512e (emulated) device support

New PowerCLI cmdlets for vSAN

More detailed information on vSAN 6.5 is available here.

vSAN 6.2 (vSphere 6.0U2)



Link to vSAN 6.2 Release Notes

Build number 3620759 (15 MAR 2016)

IPv6 support

Checksum

Deduplication and Compression

Erasure Coding (RAID-5/RAID-6)

IOPS Limits Quality of Service feature

Performance Monitoring Service

Capacity Views

Advanced setting for Sparse/Thin Swap Objects

Improvements to Degraded Disk Handling (DDH) – Capacity devices and write latency only

Support for larger VMDK objects with higher FTT values

More detailed information on vSAN 6.2 can be found here.

vSAN 6.1 (vSphere 6.0U1)



Link to vSAN 6.1 Release Notes

Build number 3029758 (10 SEP 2015)

vSAN Stretched Cluster

2-node vSAN

vSAN Witness appliance also introduced to support vSAN SC and 2-node

SMP-FT supported on vSAN

Integrated health-check (plugin no longer required)

Degraded Disk Handling (DDH) to auto-unmount problematic drives introduced

New flash technology support (NVMe, UltraDIMM)

More detailed information on vSAN 6.1 can be found here.

vSAN 6.0 (vSphere 6.0)



Link to vSAN 6.0 Release Notes

Build number 2494585 (12 MAR 2015)

All-Flash vSAN support

New on-disk format, based on Virsto technology, resulting in improved snapshots and clones

64 node cluster support, up from 32

9000 components per host, up from 3000

62TB VMDK support, up from 2TB – 512KB

Health check plugin

Introduction of Fault Domains

Proactive re-balancing of components

Default VM storage policy

Disk Serviceability via UI – flashing LEDs, mark devices as flash, mark devices as local

Evacuate data at disk or disk group granularity

Introduction of vote quorum mechanism over witness quorum mechanism

More detailed information on vSAN 6.0 can be found here.

vSAN 5.5/1.0 (vSphere 5.5U1)

No specific vSAN 5.5/1.0 Release Notes but vCenter 5.5 U1 and ESXi 5.5 U1 has references to vSAN (Virtual SAN).

Build number (ESXi 5.5 U1) 1623387 (11 MAR 2014)

In-Kernel hyper-converged infrastructure

Hybrid vSAN support (flash for cache, HDD for capacity)

VMs consume RAID-1 Mirroring, Striping, Thick/Thinness as defined via SPBM

Scale out (add hosts), Scale up (add disks) on the fly

Ruby vSphere Console with vSAN Observer

More detailed information on vSAN 5.5/1.0 can be found here.

I have not included every single patch release, but I do hope this gives some insight into the various enhancements that have appeared with each major release of vSAN, and also the benefits of upgrading to some of the newer releases. There have been many patch release between these major release as well. Check out KB article 2150753 for details on the various build numbers with each vSAN release.