The goal of this document was to describe the considerations for designing a highly available solution for leveraging vSAN in a cloud environment. This document outlined a dedicated IaaS offering for a sample customer of a VMware Cloud Provider using the cost-effective, high availability, scalability, and predictable performance capabilities of vSAN.

Achieving economies of scale means scaling storage resources in a consistent and predictable manner. Scaling the storage capacity in vSAN can be achieved by simply adding more magnetic disks (hybrid configuration) or SSDs (all-flash) to an existing disk group or by creating an entirely new disk group. Scaling the performance layer (flash layer) of vSAN is achieved in a similar way to scaling the storage capacity in the sense that you can quickly select the necessary disk devices and create a disk group.

With the combined resources of the VMware Cloud Provider Program and vSAN, an organization can achieve business-critical levels of performance and availability for a variety of workloads including databases, ERP systems, streaming content, and web services. All this can be achieved while accelerating the time to deployment, reducing costs, and simplifying operations.