With the announcement of VSAN GA announcement last week, everyone knew that vSphere 5.5 update 1 would be available soon because it is required for VSAN.

VMware released vSphere  5.5 update 1 today (11 March 2014).

You can download all the components here .

What’s new for vCenter 5.5 Update 1

• vCloud® Hybrid Service™ vSphere® Client Plug-in, is now available in vSphere Web Client.
• vCenter Server is now supported on Windows Server 2012 R2.

What’s new for vSphere 5.5 Update 1

• VMware Virtual SAN

You can check out all the details in the vCenter Server 5.5 Update 1 Release Notes & VMware ESXi 5.5 Update 1 Release Notes

According to the vSphere 5.5 Update 1 release notes there is NOT a supported upgrade of the VSAN Beta –

Test Releases of Virtual SAN 
Upgrade of Virtual SAN cluster from Virtual SAN Beta to Virtual SAN 5.5 is not supported.
Disable Virtual SAN Beta, and perform fresh installation of Virtual SAN 5.5 for ESXi 5.5 Update 1 hosts. If you were testing Beta versions of Virtual SAN, VMware recommends that you recreate data that you want to preserve from those setups on vSphere 5.5 Update 1. For more information see Retaining virtual machines of Virtual SAN Beta cluster when upgrading to vSphere 5.5 Update 1 (KB 2074147).

On March 6th  VMware annouce the the  general availability of Virtual SAN 1.0 through a webinar. In case your missed the webinar, you can go to www.vmware.com/now and watch it.

The VSAN Beta was running for 6 months and had 10,000 people sign up.  VMware is offering customers using the beta an exclusive 20% discount

At VMworld 2013 VMware announced that VSAN would support an 8 node cluster.  At PEX 2014 VMware announce that VSAN would support a 16 Node cluster.

The big announcement about VSAN 1.0 is that it will support a 32 node cluster.

Some more technical specs about VSAN 1.0

• Benchmarks have reached 2 Million IOPS (32 node Cluster)
• VSAN can scale up to 4.4 PB (35 disks x 32 hosts)

One of the things that I love about VSAN is how easy it is to setup.  One click and it is installed.

VMware will announce pricing of VSAN 1.0 the week of March 10th.

VMware released a new VSAN Design and Sizing Guide which can be downloaded here.

There is a  free VSAN Hands-on Lab (HOL) available for you to run through setting it up and getting familiar with the interface.  This is great if you don’t have the physical hardware to setup VSAN in your lab.

Duncan Epping has written a lot of great articles on VSAN

He is writting a book with Cormac Hogan – VMware Virtual SAN launch and book pre-announcement!

Top 7 Reasons Why You Should Attend the St. Louis VMUG User Conference

7.    David Hill of VMware will deliver the afternoon keynote session on Hybrid Cloud
6.    VMware will be presenting on Networking, Virtual SAN, Operations Management,
vCenter 5.5, vSphere 5.5, vCAC, Data Protection, Software Defined Data Center and more!
5.    Learn about the latest products from 30 VMware partners
4.    Enjoy longer, more in-depth VMware sessions with an updated agenda for 2014
3.    VMUG Giveaways will be provided for ALL attendees
2.    Have a beer at the reception following the event – sponsored by Veeam Software
1.    It’s FREE! (And so is breakfast and lunch)

Tuesday, March 11, 2014
7:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.

Sheraton Westport Hotel
191 Westport Plaza
St. Louis, MO 63146

Register now and see more details.

Follow @STLVMUG and  #STLVMUG on Twitter for the latest event information and updates.