7.1.4 Development Platform Clusters
vSAN is a good use case for test/development/staging environments where storage cost is a consideration. By implementing vSAN storage, service providers can avoid purchases of expensive storage arrays. This lowers the total cost of ownership for the environment, and provides a faster time to provision environments for utilization for these critical business needs. In addition, vSAN:
• Can be programmatically accessed
• Can differentiate through policies instead of tiers
• Can provide fast provisioning and agility, with no impact on production
• Can run next to the traditional storage infrastructure
• Can be used to extend into an existing platform to meet different needs
• Can be front-ended by vSphere with VMware Integrated OpenStack, vCloud Director, or VMware vRealize Automation™
• The test/development/staging environment-specific prerequisites for vSAN are as follows:
o It is a normal practice to have separate clusters for the different types of workloads (test, development or staging). It is a best practice to do an assessment for each workload to be able to design the cluster configuration for disk groups accordingly. For example, a staging environment might want to more closely mimic the production environment, and thus the policy must include availability considerations as well.
o Availability and capacity is not as pertinent to the end configuration, because these are in many cases disposable and not subject to SLAs. Also, there is a high turnover rate for the virtual machines.