VMware VSAN 1.0 Announcement

After many months of testing by more than 12000 beta testers – imagine 12k beta testers – incredible VSAN in version 1.0 will be available on week 10’th of march – next week along with pricing, licensing and further information about product.

What’s VSAN ? VSAN is a hyper-converge storage solution which abstracts local SSD and HDD storage and pools to to highly performance and resilient and persistent storage tier. other words saying – make a storage cluster out of local server storage. Do not mix up VSAN with VSA, in VSAN solution there is not software appliance running between storage and hypervisor,  VSAN is build in hypervisor kernel that’s why is so unique. One can say, yes but there are other players on the market like Nutanix, Simplivity and others with their hyper-converge solutions which can do the same or even more. Correct, however they are using software appliances (usually based on Linux) to pool and abstract local storage and present it to hypervisor which is little bit different solution then VSAN. But don’t get me wrong here, different doesn’t mean worst solution than VSAN.

Some VSAN facts:

• up to 32 hosts  vSphere 5.5 limitation, minimal vSAN implementation is 3 nodes in vSAN cluster
• max 3200 virtual machines,
• max 4.4 PB storage in 32 node vSAN cluster
• 2M IOPS – based on information provided by Cormac Hogan from VMware, using IOmeter 100% read, 4KB block size. Also 640K IOPS using IOmeter with 70/30 read/write ratio & 4KB block size) – would be fantastic to see test use case some day.
• vSphere 5.5 U1 will support vSAN 1.0
• vSAN is fully integrated with HA, DRS, vMOTION
• supported by:
  • VMware SRM – automated DR
  • vCloud Automation Center
  • VMware View

VSAN System requirements:

Host

• 1GB NIC; 10GB NIC recommended
• SATA/SAS HBA or RAID controller (with pass-through or HBA mode)
• At least one SSD and one HDD for each capacity contributing node

Cluster

• Minimum cluster size: three hosts
• Recommended SSD capacity: 5 percent of HDD capacity

Software – One of the following:

• vSphere 5.5 (VMware vSphere® Standard Edition™ or above),
• VMware vSphere® with Operations Management™ 5.5 (any edition),
• VMware vCloud® Suite 5.5 (any edition)
• VMware® vCenter Server™ 5.5

[button link=”http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=vsan” newwindow=”yes”] VMware HCL for VSAN[/button]

[button link=”http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsan/VSAN_Design_and_Sizing_Guide.pdf”] VSAN design and Sizing guide[/button]

What is Ready node and Ready Block –  it is preconfigured, tested and certified server and Ready Block is a tested and preconfigured set of servers ready for VSAN implementation. Based on information provided by VMware there are already companies which are almost ready with first VSAN ready hardware to be put on the VMware VSAN HCL list.