As outlined in this document, vSAN provides a significant value for any VMware Cloud Provider business in terms of both CapEx and OpEx. vSAN replaces traditional storage devices that require significant upfront investments with standardized commodities hardware. It also integrates the storage management operations under the same pane of glass used by the vCloud management platform instead of using multiple interfaces built on proprietary devices having variable learning curves.

vSAN enables a wide range of workloads, from the less critical to the enterprise-class workloads, with great flexibility and granular policy control. It becomes the strategic hyper-converged infrastructure solution in an elastic, non-disruptive, scalable, and evolving environment that is a software-defined data center founded upon the VMware Cloud Provider Program.

Additionally, the use case of the management cluster allows a service provider to introduce and evaluate the vSAN product in a scenario that is transparent to the tenants’ workloads, providing the opportunity of adoption on a larger scale at a subsequent time for service providers new to the vSAN architecture.