3 Things You Should Know about VMware Virtual SAN

How much do you know about Software-Defined Storage and Hyper-converged Infrastructure? Are you interested in hearing about specific use cases, performance data and how your peers are deploying it?

In our upcoming webcast, you’ll learn from Jase McCarty, Senior Technical Marketing Manager of VMware Storage and Availability, who will share how VMware Virtual SAN is leading the charge in Software-Defined Storage and making the jobs of IT managers easier, while saving money.

Registration is now open for this webcast that you won’t want to miss! Sign up and mark your calendar for Tuesday, July 30, 2015 at 11 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET.

The webcast will cover:

Why Virtual SAN is the platform of choice for running your business critical apps in your vSphere environment.
How Virtual SAN provides high, predictable performance that can tailor to your application needs.
Why and how customers like Union Hospital and Adobe are using Virtual SAN for their tier-1 applications.

Don’t miss the webcast! Register today.

Share Your Virtual SAN Story and Win a Pass to VMworld!

Radically simple storage.

Elastic scalability.

High performance.

Budget-friendly scaling.

You’ve heard what VSAN has to offer. Now, we want to hear what you have done with VSAN!

Businesses and organizations like Indonesian Cloud, Oregon State University – School of Business, Peter Cremer and several others use VSAN for a variety of use cases and applications. Here’s your chance to tell us your story – what have you accomplished with VSAN, and how has it changed your approach to storage?

Every valid submission will be entered into a random drawing for a pass to VMworld 2015 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California! [The fine print: 10 passes will be awarded, does not include travel, hotel and additional expenses. You must be a valid customer of VMware Virtual SAN to be eligible.]

Winners will be announced August 15th, so submit your story today!

Fill out the form here.

For the latest updates, be sure to subscribe to the Virtual Blocks blog, or follow our social channels at @vmwarevsan and Facebook.com/vmwarevsan.

For more information about VMware Virtual SAN, visit http://www.vmware.com/products/virtual-san/.

VMware and the Future of Storage and Availability

From the early days of VMware, it became clear that dealing with storage in efficient and scalable ways were key requirements for the success of virtualization in enterprise environments. Indeed, the storage stack of ESXi, including VMFS, played a key role in the proliferation of virtualization in data centers, where data is stored and managed by high-end disk arrays. Based on those foundations of storage virtualization, over the years, VMware introduced a range of availability and data management solutions ranging from HA, DRS and FT to Disaster Recovery and Data Protection. Moreover, VMware encouraged and supported a vast ecosystem of partners who innovated on the vSphere platform. See for example, the VADP ecosystem and more recently Virtual Volumes and VAIO I/O Filters.

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VSAN vs. Nutanix — Head-to-Head Performance Testing — Part 4 — Exchange!

For those of you have been following this thread for a while, you know we’re in the midst of head-to-head performance testing on two identical clusters: one running VSAN, the other running Nutanix. Recently, we’ve updated the Nutanix cluster to vSphere 6 and 4.1.3 — however, no differences have been observed performance since the change.

Up to now, we’ve only been able to share our VSAN results. That’s because Nutanix recently changed their EULA to prohibit any publishing of any testing by anyone. It’s very hard to find any sort of reasonable Nutanix performance information as a result. That’s unfortunate.

By comparison, VMware not only regularly publishes the results of our own tests, but also frequently approves such publication by others, once we’ve had a chance to review the methodology — simply by submitting to benchmarks@vmware.com.

Since the results are so interesting, we’re continuing to test!

As we start to move from synthetic workloads to specific application workloads, we recently finished a series of head-to-head Jetstress testing against our two identical clusters. Previous results can be found here and here.

If you’re not familiar, Jetstress is a popular Microsoft tool for testing the storage performance of Exchange clusters. A busy Exchange environment can present a demanding IO profile to a storage subsystem, so it’s an important tool in the testing arsenal.

TL:DR our basic 4-node VSAN configuration passed 1000 heavy Exchange users with flying colors — and with ample performance to spare. We can’t share with you how the identical Nutanix cluster did, but it’s certainly a worthwhile test if you have the time and inclinations.

That being said, there were no surprises — each product performed (or didn’t perform) as we would expect based on both prior testing as well as customer anecdotes.

Now, on to the details!

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United Utilities and a “VSAN First” Policy

Duncan Epping brings us a great VSAN story today — a very early VSAN adopter who now is intent on replacing as much of their existing storage environment as possible with VSAN.

For United Utilities, it’s a perfect storm of lower cost, amazing performance and a simplified operational model. All future storage requirements are going on VSAN unless there’s a really good reason not to.

But it’s not as easy as it sounds, as there are predictable organizational issues at hand 🙂

A great read!

A Classic VSAN Adoption Story

Having been a student of how new tech finds it way into data centers, I am always impressed by how many IT professionals strike this great balance between getting the benefits from the new thing — and managing potential risk.

As I talk to VSAN users, the pattern emerges. They certainly see the potential as compared to traditional storage, but are proceeding prudently.

Today’s story has to be anonymous — not everyone wants their name used. Perfectly reasonable. Let’s call our VSAN adopter Ken, just to keep things simple. Continue reading →

VSAN File Shares With Nexenta

VSAN was designed to be the best storage for your VMDKs. But that might seem a limitation if you have a need to exposed file shares, or perhaps iSCSI targets. That means running something else on top of VSAN.

One of the most powerful choices available today comes from our partner Nexenta. In addition to rich functionality, they’ve got the extra mile and have done a nice integration with both VSAN and vSphere.

Cormac Hogan runs through the basics on his blog.

VSAN In The Trenches

So much enterprise IT is delivered by small, lean teams that have to wear many hats to get the job done.

I had a chance to recently interview Serge Kovarsky, who is using VSAN more and more to get his job done — and make things simpler in the process.

Serge is part of a four-person infrastructure team for Baron Capital Management. He was one of the earlier VSAN adopters, but — it seems — has turned into a big enthusiast. Continue reading →

VSAN and Horizon: In His Own Words

One of the things I enjoy doing is getting VSAN customers on the phone, interview them and share their stories here.

But sometimes a VSAN customer is moved to write their own blog post.

Today’s happy VSAN story comes from Jeff Wong, who works for a large Australian company. He’s responsible for a multi-site Horizon deployment, and is quite happy with his choice.

In this post, he shares his thought process behind his decision. A quick read, but very illustrative on how real-world IT decisions are made.

Thanks, Jeff, for sharing!

Put another pizza in the oven, these kids are hungry

Youth sports are all about kids having fun. They play, they sweat, and hopefully have a great time. And boy do they build up an appetite.

Choosing the right refreshments during halftime, or the right restaurant after the game can be difficult. Are a couple large pizzas going to be sufficient, would a pizza buffet be in order?

pizzathumbs Choosing a team’s celebratory dinner is not unlike properly sizing a VDI solution. The exercise of sizing VDI for “up to X number of users” can be difficult. User count expectations can also be skewed when the workload is different than expected. Mileage may vary.

VMware Virtual SAN really shines at meeting performance needs while being cost effective and easily scalable through additional node or drive additions. If more storage is needed, add additional drives, or additional nodes contributing storage. If only compute is needed, simply add hosts that do not contribute storage. Very easy to scale.
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