Author Archives: Rakesh Radhakrishnan

Rakesh Radhakrishnan

About Rakesh Radhakrishnan

Rakesh Radhakrishnan Nair has 15+ years of experience in product management, consulting and software development specializing in Software Defined Storage and Big Data. Rakesh currently focuses on product management of Virtual SAN. Rakesh was previously responsible for Big Data Analytics products at VMware and Pivotal. In the past, Rakesh has held various engineering leadership and product management positions at EMC and a series of storage startups in the Valley. You can follow Rakesh on Twitter @MyNameIsNair

Virtual SAN VCG Update – New HP, Fujitsu & Quanta Controllers certified for Virtual SAN!

The Virtual SAN product team is pleased to announce that the following controllers are now certified on Virtual SAN and are listed on the Virtual SAN VCG:

6G 6.0 Hybrid:

HP P420

HP P420i

HP P220i

HP P822

Quanta SAS2308

12G 6.0 Hybrid

HP P440 (without hot plug)

12G 5.5 Hybrid

Fujitsu LSI 3008

We now have a total of 80 I/O controllers certified on Virtual SAN 5.5 and 40 I/O controllers certified on Virtual SAN 6.0.

What about the Ready Nodes for platforms based on the above controllers?

We are working closely with our OEM partners such as HP to publish Ready Nodes for both 6G and 12G platforms for Virtual SAN Hybrid and All Flash configurations for both 5.5 and 6.0 and these should be available soon.

What are the controllers that are currently in the certification queue and when do we expect them to get certified?

Please see the attached list of controllers that are currently undergoing Virtual SAN certification

Note: In many cases, we rely on our partners to provide driver/firmware fixes for controller issues so if there are delays in receiving these updates from partners, the certification timelines may get pushed out.

I have follow up questions on the attached controller list. Who do I reach out to?

As always, if you have questions on Hardware Compatibility for Virtual SAN, please email your queries to [email protected] and someone will get back to you soon!

Where do I learn more about the VMware Virtual SAN Certification process?

Please refer to the Virtual SAN Certification blog post for more details:

 

Virtual SAN Ready Nodes – Ready, Set, Go!

What is the VMware Virtual SAN team announcing today?

The VMware Virtual SAN product team is very excited to announce 24 new Virtual SAN Ready Nodes from leading OEM vendors – Dell (3 Ready Nodes), Fujitsu (5 Ready Nodes), HP (10 Ready Nodes) and SuperMicro (6 Ready Nodes)!

Screen Shot 2014-06-21 at 3.29.34 PM

What is a Virtual SAN Ready Node? How “Ready” is it?

Virtual SAN Ready Node is a hyper-converged ready-to-go hardware solution sold by server OEMs which has been pre-configured to run the Virtual SAN in a certified hardware form factor.

The Virtual SAN Ready Nodes include unique and optimized combination of hardware components from the OEM, and may also include software from the OEM for vSphere and Virtual SAN. Virtual SAN Ready Nodes are ideal as hyper-converged building blocks for large datacenter environments with strong automation and a need to customize hardware and software configurations.

OEM vendors offer Virtual SAN Ready Nodes that are unique to their server offerings and include optimized combination of hardware components (I/O controller, HDD, SSD) to run Virtual SAN. In some cases, they also include pre-loaded software for vSphere and Virtual SAN.

So what does a Virtual SAN Ready Node look like?

Virtual SAN Ready Node is a preconfigured ready-to-go hardware solution. Virtual SAN Ready Node is prescriptive in that it provides the size and quantity of CPU, Memory, Network, I/O Controller, HDD and SSD required to run a VDI or Server workload.

For a detailed list of available Ready Nodes from OEM vendors, please refer to the Virtual SAN Ready Node document

But what if I want to choose my own hardware components for Virtual SAN?

Sure, you can do that using the Build Your Own option on the VMware Virtual SAN Compatibility Guide. Using this option, you can pick any certified server, I/O Controller, SSD and HDD from your vendor of choice, decide on the quantity of each components and build out your own Virtual SAN solution.

Alternately, if you are interested in a preconfigured and ready-to-go solution which can be procured faster using a single SKU/Reference ID, go for the Virtual SAN Ready Node!

Virtual SAN Ready Nodes are also prescriptive and are classified under different solution profiles for VDI and Server use cases so we have made it easy for you to pick the Ready Node that best matches your workload profile requirement.

What are the different solution profiles under which Ready Nodes are classified?

Virtual SAN Ready Nodes are classified into Low, Medium and High profiles for Server workloads and Full Clone & Linked Clone profiles for VDI workloads. The solution profiles provide prescriptive hardware recommendations to meet different levels of workload requirements based on the maximum number of VMs (assuming an average instance size for each VM) that can be run per host.

For more details on infrastructure sizing assumptions and design considerations that were made to define sample Ready Node configurations categorized into these solution profiles, please refer to the Virtual SAN Hardware Quick Reference Guide. See snapshot of the document below:

Screen Shot 2014-06-20 at 3.06.27 PM

So how do I choose the right Ready Node for my Virtual SAN?

Visit the VMware Virtual SAN Compatibility Guide website and follow this simple process:

1. Determine your Virtual SAN workload profile requirement for VDI or Server use case.

2. Refer to the node profiles and guidance in Virtual SAN Hardware Quick Reference Guide to determine the approximate configuration that meets your needs

3. Refer to the Virtual SAN Ready Nodes document to identify preconfigured and ready-to-go Virtual SAN Ready Nodes from OEM server vendors.

The server I want is not on the Ready Node list. Will it be supported with Virtual SAN?

As long as the server is certified on the VMware vSphere Compatibility Guide, it will work with Virtual SAN and can be selected as part of the Build Your Own option to build out your Virtual SAN even if it is not one of the standard Virtual SAN Ready Node offerings. This is also true for any certified component like I/O controller, HDD and SSD on the Virtual SAN compatibility guide.

How do I quote/order the Virtual SAN Ready Node from my vendor of choice?

Please contact your OEM sales representative and use the SKU/Reference ID listed for each Ready Node to quote/order the Ready Node from your vendor’s procurement system.

Note: For some of the vendors, the SKUs/Reference IDs are still under works and we expect to get these finalized soon.

Are there more Virtual SAN Ready Nodes from other server vendors to choose from?

Yes, stay tuned. We have more Virtual SAN Ready Nodes from other server vendors coming soon over the next few weeks.

Watch this space for more details!