Our colleagues at StorageReview.com are midway through a great extended review of VSAN 6, worth reading if you’re interested.
In “VMware Virtual SAN Review: Overview and Configuration” the reviewer notes that “deploying and configuring VSAN is a simple process for those used to working in a virtualized environment, and especially for those that are familiar with vSphere“.
In “VMware Virtual SAN Review: VMmark Performance“, the choice of benchmark is interesting, as VMmark is usually seen as a compute and memory test — however, when considering hyperconverged storage, server resource utilization becomes important. The reviewer was able to load up an impressive 18 times on a modest, 4-node VSAN configuration, noting that “the overhead of the shared storage component of VSAN didn’t inhibit the overall performance of the cluster” and that “at 18 tiles, we still had CPU resources leftover on all the nodes“.
And in “VMware Virtual SAN Review: Sysbench OLTP Performance“, the reviewer spun up four transactional databases, one per server, and achieved an impressive 2,829 transactions per second, with “plenty of additional CPU headroom as well as some storage I/O headroom for additional activities”.
New: “VMware Virtual SAN Review: SQLserver Performance“, 4 SQLserver images delivered an impressive ~12,000 transactions per second, and with very good latency.
In each case, pricing for the tested systems are shared. However, head-to-head pricing comparisons vs. traditional arrays aren’t easy to get at, as the VSAN clusters not only offer shared storage services, but also supports a large number of VMs on the same hardware.
More coming soon!
