vSAN 6.1 introduced the ability to create a stretched cluster between two or more geographically separated sites, synchronously replicating data between sites.

This stretched cluster feature introduced enterprise-level availability where an entire site failure can be tolerated, with no data loss and near zero downtime. In addition, the feature enables disaster and downtime avoidance by allowing the proactive migration of virtual machines from one site to another in order to avoid an impending outage, or for planned maintenance purposes.

vSphere vMotion and vSphere DRS are natively integrated into a stretched cluster architecture and can help load balance workloads between two active sites, while vSAN insures high performance by making sure that virtual machines use the local site copy for read and write operations.

 

 

Because of the tight integration with the VMware advanced features like vSphere vMotion, vSphere DRS and vSphere HA, the stretched cluster solution works seamlessly with little additional operational overhead, and expands the knowledge of vSphere administrators, who are already familiar with how to operate and run everything around vSphere.

vSAN removes all the complexity around storage management traditionally seen in a multisite environment and also simplifies storage tasks to a few clicks in the vSphere Web Client.