Introducing a Technical Overview of vSphere Storage Appliance
When SMBs contemplate whether to virtualize, they often face shared storage hardware for the first time. Now, VMware has introduced vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) to provide shared storage benefits for SMBs without shared storage hardware in a cost-effective and simplified manner. With VSA, SMBs can unlock business continuity features within vSphere such as high availability (automatically restart your applications when your servers fail), vMotion (perform hardware maintenance without service disruption by live migrating your workloads), and Data Recovery (backup all of your business critical applications and data).
For an overview on VSA architecture, deployment of a VSA storage cluster, and VSA’s monitoring capabilities, check out this technical paper by our resident storage expert Cormac Hogan.
Stay tuned for our upcoming post in January about how the VSA solution can be more cost-effective than using the traditional approach of shared storage hardware…
This is Interesting technology for sure, but the cost of this software is excessive considering an entry level SAN could be purchased for the same or less money. Also, it looks to me as though all these storage subsystems are communicating over 1GB Ethernet (85MB/sec max). That’s going to be painfully slow, unless each ESXi host is running 10 “teamed” Ethernet adapters. Compare that to “old” 4GB fibre channel which offers roughly10 times the bandwidth of 1GB Ethernet. With all this in mind, I am not seeing the value of this solution.