While browsing the familiar vCenter UI right after an upgrade from 6.7U3 to 7.0U1 I noticed some small but nice changes I wanted to share.
RAID_D for integrity
When we put a host in Maintenance Mode with Ensure Accessibility option we will see a new RAID type ->RAID_D. It guarantees that all new write operations have two copies of data (for data integrity). In the example below esxi-59 is in MM, so all new writes go to esxi-74 (as a backup for esxi-59) and to esxi-79. Note that Witness object in this example is also on esxi-74 node as the RAID_D component. It is because we have 3 node vSAN cluster.
![](https://www.softwaredefinedblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/image-16-1024x317.png)
Compression ONLY
If the workload is not dedupe – friendly but can benefit from compression, now there is an option to enable Compression only on vSAN all-flesh datastore. The bonus is (in comparison to dedupe & compression) that in case of a failure of a capacity disk, whole disk group will NOT be unmounted.
![](https://www.softwaredefinedblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/image-17-1024x481.png)
Datastore Sharing aka HCI Mesh
If you have more than 2 clusters under the same vCenter, you can mount vSAN datastore from the remote cluster and use as a spare capacity for VMs.
![](https://www.softwaredefinedblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/image-18-1024x316.png)
![](https://www.softwaredefinedblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/image-19-1024x174.png)
IOINSIGHT
Now the famous VMware fling IOInsight is integrated with vCenter UI performance tab. We can run an instance of it on the selected target hosts and monitor in detail I/O performance of VMs.
![](https://www.softwaredefinedblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/image-20-1024x488.png)
![](https://www.softwaredefinedblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/image-21-1024x594.png)
![](https://www.softwaredefinedblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/image-28-1024x572.png)
![](https://www.softwaredefinedblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/image-22-1024x590.png)
![](https://www.softwaredefinedblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/image-23.png)
![](https://www.softwaredefinedblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/image-24-1024x360.png)
![](https://www.softwaredefinedblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/image-26-1024x538.png)
![](https://www.softwaredefinedblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/image-27-1024x212.png)
I/O Performance comparison between VMs
We can now pick up to 10 VMs and compare I/O performance between them for more detailed analysis on how does a certain VM behaves in comparison to others on a shared chart or use separated charts.
![](https://www.softwaredefinedblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/image-30-1024x552.png)