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Albert WidjajaFlag for Australia

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VMware vSAN 6.5 usage example and caveats

Hi People,

Can anyone here please share some good use for the VMware vSAN and what are the caveats or limitation in terms of the feature ?

The reason I ask this is because I've got about about 12+ ESXi running on various rack mount servers (HP & Dell brand) so I wonder if I populate the Local HDD with the largest possible drive I can make good use of it better than my current HP 3PAR & Lefthand SAN running through iSCSI connection.

Thanks in advance.

http://www.vmware.com/products/whats-new-virtual-san.html
Avatar of Albert Widjaja
Albert Widjaja
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My manager is interested to explore and invest in this vSAN technology since it is cheaper than adding more shelf to the existing Storage array or even expand the QNAP NAS for the file server.
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Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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Ah I see,
There are quite some mandatory requirements there as you mentioned Andrew.

I guess I will have to add:
one more 2x 10 GBps NIC for the dedicated traffic
minimum of 4x local HDD of any type per server to be participated in minimum of 4x ESXi vSAN cluster.

Hence all of the single U rack server is bit hard to implement.

What are the good use in VSAN that you know of for example ?
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Andrew, many thanks for the explanation and the sharing.

You need at least 1 x SSD or Flash PCI-E device, and 1 x HDD per Host.

This can be tricky since it must use one SSD per server.
Thanks !
OK So if i just use all SATA 15000 rpm disk, then I can still create vSAN storage cluster ?
No you cannot. Minimum 1 x SSD and 1 x HDD per vSAN node.

You can look at the setup here in my EE Article

HOW TO: Set up a lab environment for vSAN using VMware Workstation
Ah I see,

My only reason to try pushing vSAN is that it is cheaper alternative to upgrading existing HP SAN.

Hopefully the license is. It expensive.

Thanks Andrew.
I would compare and contrast the figures. It's generally considered cheaper than purchasing a new SAN, if you do not have one, or changing to a new All FLASH SAN.