vSAN ESA now available in VMC on AWS

VMware recently announced (on November 14th) the initial availability of vSAN ESA (Express Storage Architecture) within the VMware Cloud on AWS platform with their SDDC 1.24 release. This development allows VMware Cloud on AWS adopters to leverage the benefits of vSAN ESA, a purpose-built, high-performance storage solution.

Why should that even matter to me? vSAN has been offered in VMC on AWS since the product was released…
That is 100% accurate, however, the new ESA architecture offers many benefits which include better performance, lower latency, higher resiliency, shorter data rebuild times, more usable capacity, better compression, native snapshots and much more!

This new architecture is only offered today on the i4i.metal hosts for now, however, more host types can be added at any time. It also requires the VMware team to enable the ESA feature for the customers that want to be part of the initial rollout (cannot simply select it when creating a new SDDC quite yet).

Performance comparison graph

Should we expect to see vSAN Max being offered within VMC on AWS in the near future?!

Official VMware Cloud Blog link here
Official VMware Cloud Tech Zone link here
vSAN Extreme Performance Series 2023 video here