Adopting a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) and vSAN approach can present a huge shift in how storage is deployed, operated, and maintained by a service provider when compared to traditional SAN storage arrays. For instance, at a high level, vSAN adoption is likely to impact tasks such as:

The reason vSAN adoption has such a significant impact on so many areas is that it leverages a converged platform for both compute and storage in a VM-centric mechanism, to transform complex and often manual tasks into a simple and clean single point of management with policy based automation.

Traditionally, storage is used by the vSphere platform to provide the required disk components of the environment, meaning that at least two different means of operations and expertise are required, with storage fabric networking often considered yet another area of expertise and operations. When employing vSAN, there will be only one single point of management to provision and manage the vSphere infrastructure, which includes all the necessary IT resources required for day-to-day operations, such as the provisioning and monitoring of virtual servers, storage, and networks.

However, like any other storage platform, vSAN storage architects must work with application owners and other IT teams to plan an appropriate storage infrastructure, and provision a suitable platform to meet the requirements of the service providers Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In most service provider architectures, deployment issues in this phase include providing sufficient:

The very nature of traditional shared storage systems means that the many-to-one relationship of VMs to physical hypervisor requires multiple VMs to be deployed on a single class of storage, or to suffer the massively increased complexity and management overhead for having hundreds of LUNs presented to vSphere clusters. The vSAN operational model is significantly different from this traditional storage design and administration, which typically requires a multi-disciplinary approach to these skills.

As a part of the storage lifecycle, the service provider’s storage administrators must operate and maintain the day-to-day delivery of storage services, which must meet SLAs with tenants. Typically, as part of these contracts, data must be protected and secured at all times. One of the main advantages of operating storage at the VM level with vSAN is that it provides and enforces a per-VM/VM-disk storage policy through the Storage-Policy Based Management (SPBM) mechanism. With SPBM, each VM is provisioned with the required set of availability, performance, and storage capacity attributes required to meet its SLA. The SPBM mechanism then enforces policies automatically throughout the VM lifecycle.

However, when designing a traditional array-based storage system, storage is initially provisioned according to various policies required to meet the SLAs. These service levels must then be maintained through various management activities, including monitoring, troubleshooting, and remediation. This requires a team of storage administrators working behind the scenes preserving capacity, expanding as necessary, monitoring, and maintaining utilization, managing DR processes and performing regular testing of backups, and confirming their recoverability is validated.

This is one of the key operational advantages of vSAN, and where operational teams can see the most significant improvement over that traditional inflexible storage architecture. vSAN offers a per-VM capability to deliver to each workload its specific requirements, as opposed to delivering tiered services. The result in operational efficiency can release a significant saving in both upfront costs and operational costs over time, especially in environments where workloads have shifting requirements. 

This document focuses on providing a detailed assessment of three key storage operational tasks. These tasks have been determined to have the highest impact in terms of both time and operational effort, from either a single task, such as initial deployment, or repeated tasks, which can be measured over the lifecycle of a traditional mid-range Fibre Channel storage array. The aim of this exercise is to estimate the upfront and ongoing savings in terms of both operational effort and monetary cost. This breakdown will then be compared with similar vSAN operations to help build a total cost of ownership analysis, which in turn forms part of a business case for decision makers for a VMware-based hyper-converged transformation project.