7.1.1 Tier 1 / Tier 2 / Tier 3 Workloads
A vSAN infrastructure is a highly effective solution for almost any virtualization workloads. vSAN provides the flexibility to configure the level of performance and redundancy required for workloads, such as:
• MS Exchange / SQL
• Oracle
• SAP
This allows for the policy to be changed as business needs demand, lowering costs, and simplifying operations for the organization as well as providing a building-block scale-up and out architecture.
When implementing a vSAN design for Tier 1 / Tier 2 / Tier 3 workloads, there are a number of specific design considerations that must be taken into account to be successful:
• Normally workloads are a balanced workload type, where the recommended designs are a mix between the need for performance and the need for capacity. Policy recommendations must take this into account to prevent a single policy from being used for all workloads, negating the benefit of software-defined storage. Tier 1 or business critical applications may have varying workloads however.
• When designing the disk group configuration, verify that there are enough disk groups configured to provide the level of availability and performance required by the environment and verify that the workloads selected are appropriate for use with vSAN, and will benefit from the policy-based configurations.
• Application needs and dependencies assessment must be completed before the design is implemented so that the policies meet the needs of the workloads to be hosted.
For more information on employing vSAN on various workload types, please refer to the product-specific papers in the reference section.