vSAN 9.0 Express Storage Architecture - Global Deduplication and Replication

vSAN 9.0 introduces transformative capabilities that address long-standing customer requests for simplified disaster recovery, enhanced capacity efficiency, and seamless public cloud integration. The Express Storage Architecture (ESA) introduced in vSAN 8 laid the foundation with a modernized file system, but vSAN 9.0 builds on this foundation with software-defined global deduplication, native replication capabilities, and enhanced management features.

Global deduplication represents a major architectural enhancement that operates at the vSAN datastore level rather than per-disk group (as in OSA). This global approach identifies duplicate data blocks across all storage devices in the entire cluster, enabling significantly higher deduplication ratios than the OSA's cache-tier-only deduplication. Early customer testing demonstrates up to 8× capacity reduction in environments with significant data redundancy (VDI, persistent containers, cloned VMs), though actual deduplication ratios vary based on workload characteristics and data patterns. The software-defined approach eliminates proprietary hardware requirements, enabling commodity server deployments to achieve deduplication ratios previously possible only with enterprise storage arrays.

vSAN-to-vSAN replication built on the vSAN Data Protection snapshot framework provides native disaster recovery capabilities without third-party software or complex array-based replication. VM-level granularity enables selective replication of critical workloads while excluding non-critical VMs from DR protection, reducing remote site capacity requirements and network bandwidth consumption compared to traditional LUN-based array replication. Recovery operations benefit from VM-level granularity as well: administrators can restore individual VMs as needed rather than recovering entire LUNs that may contain dozens of VMs, accelerating RTO (Recovery Time Objective) for targeted recovery scenarios.

VMware Live Recovery (VLR) integration combines vSAN replication with cyber recovery capabilities, enabling rapid recovery from ransomware or data corruption events. VLR provides immutable snapshots stored at the remote site that remain protected from encryption attacks on the primary site, with automated recovery workflows that can restore clean data even when primary infrastructure is compromised. This integration positions vSAN as a platform-level cyber resilience solution rather than requiring separate backup infrastructure and software licenses.

Public cloud integration strategy with vSAN ESA deployment across major hyperscalers (AWS VMware Cloud, Google Cloud VMware Engine, Azure VMware Solution) ensures consistent operational models across on-premises edge, core data centers, and public cloud endpoints. vVols deprecation in VCF 9.0 reflects this unified storage strategy: vSAN ESA provides the common storage platform across all deployment models, while vVols remains a niche solution with low adoption rates and limited hyperscaler support. Organizations can maintain storage expertise on a single platform (vSAN ESA) rather than managing multiple storage architectures across hybrid cloud deployments.

Source KB: https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/vsan-9-release

KB Number: vsan-9-esa

Orchestrator Integration: Automation Workflow

Goal: Automate vsan 9.0 express storage architecture - global deduplication and replication configuration and validation to reduce manual effort and ensure consistency across environments.

Workflow steps (VMware Aria Orchestrator)

• Create a workflow: 'vSAN vSAN 9.0 Express Storage Architecture - Global Deduplication and Replication Automation'
* Inputs: clusterName (string), configParams (object)
* Step 1: Query vSAN cluster configuration via vCenter API - collect storage policies, capacity utilization, performance baselines
* Step 2: Validate prerequisites from KB vsan-9-esa - check version compatibility, hardware requirements, feature dependencies
* Step 3: Implement configuration changes through vSAN management API with validation at each step
* Step 4: Execute health checks post-configuration - run vSAN health service tests, verify storage policy compliance, check resync status
* Step 5: Generate capacity planning report - project future growth, identify optimization opportunities, recommend scaling strategy
* Step 6: Update documentation in CMDB with new configuration state, KB reference, validation results, timestamp

Expected outcome

Automated vSAN storage configuration management reduces manual effort, ensures consistency with KB guidance, provides validation and documentation for compliance.