The vSphere and vSAN 7.0 U1 release provides numerous performance gains, which have been tested and documented by the VxRail performance engineering team at Dell Technologies. The benefits include lower cost, greater redundancy, and greater fault tolerance.

vSAN 7.0 U1 provides performance increases across all workload types, small block and large block, for both reads and writes, with greater increases in writes. Most significantly, performance is nearly equal to the performance of RAID 5 workloads. Because the storage policy can be changed without taking a workload offline, VxRail customers can now tap into the extra 25 percent capacity that RAID 5 provides compared to RAID 1.

VxRail customers can also now take advantage of compression-only, reducing the failure domain that is present with deduplication and compression, while still achieving most of the top-end performance improvements that 7.0 U1 provides. Customers who still want to use deduplication and compression will see better performance in comparison to vSAN 7.0 without those data services. Another benefit of compression-only is that it reduces throughput by only 16 percent, thus improving drive rebuild times.

VxRail customers who adopted NVMe cache drives and Intel Optane cache can see significant performance improvements compared to SAS cache drives. These drive technologies offer more predictable latency and higher top-end performance, especially for database workloads.

Given the recent findings and new capabilities, there is no better time to upgrade to the most recent version of VxRail and VMware software. Directly upgrading from previous VxRail software versions to the newest version is easy, so that customers can quickly take advantage of the latest improvements.