Introduction

Many VMware Cloud Providers™ deliver business compute and storage platforms which extend across on-premises and provider data centers to their customers. However, these hybrid solutions typically require high levels of CapEx and OpEx, and are therefore out of reach for many small businesses and startups.

Deploying VMware vSAN™ in a two-node configuration on small sites, using low-cost standard server components or vSAN ready nodes, enables small businesses or startups with limited capital to avoid the significant up-front costs associated with storage hardware. In addition, by automating the management of virtual machines through Storage-Policy Based Management (SPBM), operational costs can also be lowered, with no need for end customers to provide administrative assistance during setup or operational management of the solution. All administration can easily be performed centrally by the service provider as part of their managed service offering, or delegated to local end-customer administrative staff through the use of VMware vCenter Server® role-based access control (RBAC) and the user-friendly VMware vSphere® Web Client.

This solution is in contrast to the use of local storage at similar on-premises deployments, and the limitations associated with such configurations. The use of local disk VMFS datastores, without vSAN, introduces multiple risks to uptime of local applications, and provides no redundancy for failure. For instance, with this local disk architecture, a single copy of the virtual machine's files is stored. If that disk fails, the virtual machine will fail, and the only option might be to restore from backups, which is likely to be time consuming and may result in the loss of business data, depending on the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) set out in the application’s Service Level Agreement (SLA). While other availability options might exist for local storage solutions such as these, they are typically not automated, are unlikely to minimize data loss, and will likely not provide a recovery time of less than 90 seconds, which is a common RPO and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) offered by the VMware vSphere High Availability (HA) mechanism.

This article demonstrates how VMware Cloud Providers can provide low-cost hybrid solutions to small businesses and startups by benefitting from the simple two-node on-premises architecture offered through vSAN, which is typically referred to by VMware and others as the Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO) solution.

The primary aim of this architecture is to offer small businesses and startup customers a simple, on-premises compute and shared storage solution, while minimizing up-front deployment costs and long-term operational overhead.

Benefits to IT users within the end customer’s organization include providing local, on-premises services, such as Active Directory authentication, file and other large data services, and optimized and low-cost recovery of the data center resources provided by the VMware Cloud Provider. However, in the past, server resources on site at the end customer’s location could prove to be cost prohibitive, due to the requirement for shared storage to facilitate vSphere features such as vSphere HA.