The first and most important design consideration for vSAN is to adhere to the VMware Compatibility Guide at http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=vsan. When designing a vSAN cluster, use similarly configured and sized hosts. Otherwise, the performance and capacity expectations will be compromised. Most VMware Cloud Providers have a preferred server vendor and, more than likely, they have a preconfigured and validated server (Ready Node) architecture for vSAN. If not, providers can also build their own vSAN nodes using the information provided by the compatibility guide. From an operational standpoint, the Ready Nodes have been the preferred choice of infrastructure for vSAN.

vCloud Director management clusters have different requirements than a resource cluster. Traditionally, providers would allocate dedicated storage for management-only clusters, which would ultimately increase the infrastructure costs. Deployment of a management cluster would normally entail the purchase of an additional storage array to provide the expected performance and availability for what is typically a high I/O throughput and highly available virtual environment. These costs, in turn, would inherently be passed on to the consumer. With vSAN, these costs are significantly reduced making it an ideal solution for a dedicated management environment. Using vSAN for the management cluster provides an entire integrated stack that is automated by the vCenter Server system. The storage is locally attached and backed by SSD-based cache. Take the following best practices into consideration when designing a management cluster backed by vSAN:

When designing a vSAN backed vCloud Director infrastructure, VMware recommends not using a vSAN datastore for catalogs. All catalog media images are uploaded as file objects into the same directory structure by vCloud Director. If the same vSAN datastore is used as storage policy for different catalogs, they will share one VM Home Namespace object with maximum size of 256 GB. In this case, use a third-party virtual storage appliance that provides NFS file services to provide catalogs that scale larger than 256 GB.