VMware vSAN (Virtual SAN)

VMware vSAN is a radically simple, enterprise-class shared storage solution for hyper-converged infrastructure optimised for today’s all-flash performance.

Create software-defined shared storage for virtual machines and reduce TCO as much as 50 percent with VMware vSAN.

What is Virtual SAN?

VMware vSAN is radically simple, enterprise-class native storage for VMware Hyper-Converged Software solutions. Uniquely embedded in the hypervisor, VMware vSAN delivers high performance, flash-optimised hyper-converged storage for any virtualised application—at a fraction of the cost of traditional, purpose-built storage and other less-efficient hyper-converged infrastructure solutions. Virtual SAN clusters server-attached flash devices and/or hard disks to provide a flash-optimised, highly resilient shared datastore suitable for a variety of workloads including business-critical applications, virtual desktops, remote IT, DR, and DevOps infrastructure.

Architecture and Performance

Uniquely embedded within the hypervisor, VMware vSAN sits directly in the I/O data path, in the best position to make rapid data placement decisions. As a result, vSAN is able to deliver the highest levels of performance without taxing CPU or memory resources, as compared to other storage virtual appliances and HCI software stacks that run separately on top of the hypervisor. VMware vSAN can be configured as all-flash or hybrid storage, delivering over 6M IOPS with an all-flash architecture.

Storage Efficiency

VMware vSAN delivers advanced storage features, including deduplication, compression and erasure coding (RAID 5/6), capable of delivering up to 10x greater storage utilisation with dramatically lower storage capacity and costs. The efficiency features work seamlessly together on any workload with minimal (typically <5%) additional resource overhead, a significant advantage compared to other hyperconverged solutions.

Scalability

Virtual SAN has a distributed architecture that allows for grow-as-you-go, non-disruptive scaling from 2 to 64 hosts per cluster. Both capacity and performance can be scaled at the same time by adding a new host to the cluster (scale-out); or capacity and performance can be scaled independently by merely adding new drives to existing hosts (scale-up).

Management and Integration

Virtual SAN does not require any additional software to be installed—it can be enabled in a few, simple clicks. It is managed from the vSphere Web Client and integrates with the VMware stack including key features like vMotion®, High Availability (HA), and Fault Tolerance (FT) as well as other VMware products such as VMware Site Recovery Manager™, VMware vRealize® Automation™ and vRealize Operations™. Automation: VM storage provisioning and storage service levels (e.g. capacity, performance, availability) are automated and controlled through VM-centric policies that can be set or modified on-the-fly. Virtual SAN dynamically self-tunes, adjusting to ongoing changes in workload conditions to load balance storage resources, ensuring each VM adheres to the storage policies defined for it.

VMware Consultancy Expertise

As a VMware Enterprise Consultancy Partner, Krome Technologies has the technical and business accreditation to design, plan and deploy sophisticated VMware vSAN solutions, if you would like any further information please complete the form below or contact us on 01932 232345.


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