Deploying the application on a new cluster with vSAN 8.0 ESA using a new hardware design is the correct answer because it will satisfy the customer’s requirement for low latency. vSAN 8.0 ESA is a new architecture that uses a storage pool configuration where all disks are treated as capacity disks and use a new algorithm to distribute data across them. This improves the I/O flow, reduces the write amplification, and eliminates the cache tier bottleneck. Using a new hardware design with all-flash disks or NVMe disks will further enhance the performance and latency of the application, as these disks have faster read and write speeds than hybrid disks. Deploying the new applications on the existing cluster with a RAID-6 VM storage policy and an additionalstripe width of 4, deploying the application on a new cluster with vSAN 8.0 OSA using the existing hybrid configuration, and performing an in-place upgrade from vSAN 7.0 U2 OSA to vSAN 8.0 ESA are not valid or optimal solutions for this scenario. Deploying the new applications on the existing cluster with a RAID-6 VM storage policy and an additional stripe width of 4 will increase the resiliency and availability of the data, but it will also increase the network traffic, disk space consumption, and parity calculation overhead, which will negatively affect the latency and performance of the application. Deploying the application on a new cluster with vSAN 8.0 OSA using the existing hybrid configuration will not improve the latency significantly, as vSAN 8.0 OSA still uses the same disk group configuration as vSAN 7.0 U2 OSA, where one disk is designated as a cache disk and the rest are capacity disks. The cache disk can still become a bottleneck for high-performance applications, especially if it is not an SSD or NVMe disk. Performing an in-place upgrade from vSAN 7.0 U2 OSA to vSAN 8.0 ESA is not possible, as vSAN ESA requires a different hardware design than vSAN OSA. The existing disk groups need to be deleted and all disks need to be erased before switching to vSAN ESA. References:

[VMware vSAN Specialist v2 Exam Preparation Guide], page 6

What’s New in VMware vSAN 8.0