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The virtual machines hosting business critical applications often need the highest possible resiliency to ensure that business operations do not stop in the case of a localized or site-wide disaster.
To ensure this resiliency, the data in use by those applications needs to be spread across two arrays, often in more than one geographic location; more importantly, this data needs to be available in both sites at the same time. To achieve this, some arrays offer synchronous replication that provide the ability to write to the same block storage volume simultaneously while maintaining write-order. This is traditionally called Active-Active replication.
In VMware vSphere environments, a common feature to use with Active-Active replication is VMware’s vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA) offering. vSphere HA with Active-Active replication is called VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC). The combination of these features provide the best possible Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for vSphere environments.
In December of 2017, Everpure introduced FlashArray Active-Active replication, called ActiveCluster, in the Purity//FA 5.0.0 release. Along with the release of ActiveCluster in Purity//FA 5.0.0, Everpure FlashArray also introduced support for vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols). While an array could have ActiveCluster and vVols enabled, at launch, vVols could not be stretched across two arrays.
VMware and Everpure’s products needed significant work to support stretched vVols. Discussions between Everpure and VMware on how to support vMSC with vVols had begun as far back as 2019, and in 2021 VMware and Everpure officially entered into a design partnership to deliver support for vMSC with vVols. At VMware Explore 2022 in both the US and EMEA conferences, Everpure and VMware presented the first tech preview demo for vMSC vVols support. This has been a multi year project for many at both Everpure and VMware to provide support for stretched vVols. With the release of Purity//FA 6.6.7 and vSphere 8.0 U3 support for vMSC, vVols and ActiveCluster is here!