vSAN Introduction
VMware Hyper-Converged Software (HCS) transforms industry-standard x86 servers and directly attached storage into radically simple Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) to help eliminate high IT costs, management complexity, and performance limitations.
vSAN is a software-defined storage solution that is fully integrated with vSphere. vSAN aggregates locally attached disks in a vSphere cluster to create a storage solution that rapidly can be provisioned from VMware vCenter Server® during virtual machine provisioning operations. It is an example of a hypervisor-converged platform—that is, a solution in which storage and compute for virtual machines are combined into a single device, with storage being provided within the hypervisor itself as opposed to through a storage virtual machine running alongside other virtual machines.
vSAN is an object-based storage system designed to provide virtual machine-centric storage services and capabilities through an SPBM platform. Object-based storage is considered a leading technology for hybrid cloud deployments because many of its most prominent features, such as massive scalability, geographic independence, and multi-tenancy, have proven ideal for cloud storage. SPBM and virtual machine storage policies are solutions designed to simplify virtual machine storage placement decisions for vSphere administrators.
Figure 2. vSAN Cluster Example
vSAN has been tightly integrated with vCenter Server to deliver the leading HCI solution that offers simplicity, reliability, and performance for nearly any service provider use case. vSAN is fully integrated with core vSphere enterprise features, such as VMware vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA), VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler™ (vSphere DRS), and VMware vSphere vMotion®. The goal of vSAN is to provide both high availability and scale-out storage functionality. It also can be considered in the context of quality of service (QoS) because virtual machine storage policies can be created to define the levels of performance and availability required on a per–virtual machine basis.
vSAN is easy to implement with automated configuration and includes proactive tests to help verify functionality and performance. vSAN is optimized for modern all-flash storage with efficient nearline deduplication, compression, and erasure coding capabilities that lower TCO while delivering incredible performance.
New and improved features such as the performance and health services make it easier than ever to verify vSAN configurations and closely monitor key metrics such as IOPs, throughput, and latency at the cluster, host, virtual machine, and virtual disk levels. Quality of service can be managed by using IOPs limits on a per-virtual machine and per-virtual disk basis. vSAN 6.2, the latest iteration, is ready for any application with tested and validated deployments of several business critical applications, including SAP and Oracle RAC. vSAN 6.2 also provides VMware Cloud Providers with:
• A converged platform (compute + storage using commodity hardware)
• A simple to manage storage platform, as with CPU and memory
• The ability to scale on demand, in lock-step with application needs, but also in a flexible way
• Per-VM automated SLA management
In addition, one of the key features of vSAN is that the product runs as a kernel module, rather than running as a virtual appliance in a cluster, as many competitor solutions do. This allows for greater performance and better interaction with the vSphere hypervisor.
