Dell VxRail Network Planning Guide

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VMware vSAN architectures

VxRail supports VMware vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) and VMware vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA). VMware vSAN OSA is a two-tier model that is built on the foundation of disk groups. VMware vSAN ESA is a single-tier model that uses high-performance NVMe drives and the continuous increase in CPU cores to support a data store. The data store is based on a single pool of storage instead of disk groups.

VMware vSAN OSA

A disk group consists of a single cache drive that is partnered with one or more capacity drives. A collection of disk groups is used to form a VMware vSAN data store.

Figure 1. Local VMware vSAN OSA data store deployed on a VxRail cluster. Local VMware vSAN OSA data store deployed on a VxRail cluster
Local vSAN OSA datastore deployed on a VxRail cluster

The cluster initialization inventories disk drives on the nodes, and uses that to identify the number of disk groups on each node for the VMware vSAN data store. The high-endurance SSD drives discovered on each node serve as a cache for VM I-O operations in each disk group. The high-capacity drives that are discovered are the primary permanent storage resource for the VMs for each disk group. The VMware vSAN build process partners the discovered cache drives with one or more capacity drives to form disk groups. The resulting VMware vSAN data store consists of this collection of disk groups.

VxRail clusters with VMware vSAN data stores based on the VMware vSAN OSA support solid-state and NVMe drives for both cache and capacity, and solid-state and hard drives for capacity only. This architecture supports network speeds of 10 GbE, 25 GbE, and 100 GbE.

VMware vSAN ESA

With VMware vSAN ESA, every drive can serve both cache and capacity requirements.

Figure 2. Local VMware vSAN ESA data store deployed on a VxRail cluster. Local VMware vSAN ESA data store deployed on a VxRail cluster
Local vSAN ESA data store deployed on a VxRail cluster

During the inventory process, VxRail queries the drive slots and verifies whether a data store can be built with the VMware vSAN ESA. The data store is only built with this architecture if all the drive slots contain compatible NVMe drives. If you select VMware vSAN ESA, the network that is configured to support the data store must be running 10 GbE, 25 GbE, or 100 GbE.

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