Traditionally, providing dedicated storage for management-only clusters increased providers’ infrastructure costs. It required the purchase of an additional storage array to provide the expected performance and availability for what is typically a high I/O performance and highly-available virtual environment. These costs, in turn, were inherently passed on to the consumer. With vSAN, these costs are significantly reduced, making it an ideal solution for a dedicated management environment. Additionally, leveraging vSAN for the management cluster eliminates single points of failure and is completely integrated with vCenter Server. See the following figure for a logical diagram of this architecture.

 

For more information on implementing vSAN for management and cloud management platform clusters, see the Leveraging VMware Virtual SAN for Highly Available Management Clusters vCAT-SP paper (http://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/vcat/vmware-leveraging-virtual-san-for-ha-management-clusters.pdf).