Virtual SAN software can enable greater availability and reliability and make effective use of server-side storage. It also enables non-disruptive data movement, which in turn enables simplified management and better utilization of storage capacity.

What is Virtual SAN?

VMware Virtual SAN is a new software-defined storage tier for VMware vSphere environments. Virtual SAN clusters server disks and flash to create radically simple, high performance, resilient shared storage designed for virtual machines.

Virtual SAN aggregates locally attached disks in a vSphere cluster to create a storage solution that rapidly can be provisioned from VMware vCenter during virtual machine provisioning operations.  Based on a hypervisor-converged distributed architecture embedded in the vSphere kernel, Virtual SAN can make optimal data placement and I/O optimizations.

Virtual SAN is an object-based storage system designed to provide virtual machine–centric storage services and capabilities through a SPBM (Storage Policy-Based Management) platform. SPBM and virtual machine storage policies are solutions designed to simplify virtual machine storage placement decisions for vSphere administrators. This virtualizes existing storage arrays and direct-attached storage to create pools of capacity based on performance characteristics. The storage administrator will carve out these pools and be able to assign storage to apps according to their need from the resources available.

Despite the use of “VSAN”, VMware VSAN differs from traditional virtual storage area networks.  A virtual storage area network is a logical partition in a storage area network. Traditional VSANs can isolate traffic within specific portions of a SAN. A VMware VSAN can be constructed to be independent of other VSANs, which adds both security and stability.

Virtual SAN is fully integrated with core vSphere enterprise features such as VMware vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA), VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (vSphere DRS), and VMware vSphere vMotion. Its goal is to provide both high availability and scale-out storage functionality.

Each host in a VMware VSAN cluster requires at least one solid-state drive (SSD) which is used for caching reads and buffering writes, and at least one hard disk drive (HDD), which is used for data storage. Additional storage can be placed in the pool by adding HDDs to available ESXi hosts.

Benefits

Radically Simple Storage: Virtual SAN is the first policy-driven storage product designed for vSphere environments that simplifies and streamlines storage provisioning and management.
Using VM-level storage policies, Virtual SAN automatically and dynamically matches requirements with underlying storage resources. With Virtual SAN, many manual storage tasks are automated - delivering a more efficient and cost-effective operational model.

High Performance: Virtual SAN enables read/write caching using server-side flash, optimizing the I/O data path to deliver better performance than a virtual appliance or an external device.

Lower TCO:  Virtual SAN allows you to granularly scale-up or scale-out your storage environment giving you the flexibility to grow your storage environment without costly overprovisioning. Virtual SAN is hardware- agnostic and its simple, easy-to-use design increases operational efficiency, saving you both time and money.

Conclusion

VMware Virtual SAN is a hypervisor-converged storage platform that combines the compute and storage resources of vSphere hosts. It provides enterprise-class features and performance with a much simpler management experience for the user. It is a VMware-designed storage solution that makes software-defined storage a reality for VMware customers.

                                                                                                                                              

Author: Jiawen