Performance metrics are also available for all of the upper-level components of vSAN. With vSAN 6.2, we can also view performance data at the cluster, host, disk group, and devices. In addition, as illustrated in Figure 16, it also provides the same visibility for specific virtual machines and their respective disks.

Being able to view metrics at this level of virtual machine consumption shows what the virtual machine is experiencing from an application perspective. Then, going deeper into the individual metrics which are available on a per disk basis provides even further granularity, as it is very common to have virtual machines configured with more than one virtual disk. Of course, with vSAN leveraging Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM), it is entirely possible to have completely different storage policies applied to different virtual disks. However, different properties like an SPBM policy, workload, capacity, and more can also contribute to the performance characteristics of a virtual disk.

 

Capacity details are also available in the vSAN user interface making it easy for administrators to understand how much capacity various object types are consuming, as illustrated in the following figure.

 

 

vSAN includes the vSAN API, which is an extension of the vSphere API. The vSAN API centers on a small set of managed objects, which enable administrators to query runtime state, as well as configure vSAN. The API is exposed as a web service, running on both vCenter Server systems and ESXi systems. Managed objects are available for cluster-level and host-level operations.