In my last post I detailed the importance of VM-centricity with Virtual Volumes and the fundamental problem that it solves for customers. In this post, I will provide more insight on how Virtual Volumes can make your life easier through streamlined operations.
For both the VI Admin and Storage Admin, Virtual Volumes greatly simplifies management over the existing operational model. Virtual Volumes allows separating storage presentation from storage consumption.
In a previous post, we began to present our case as to why we believe VMware Virtual SAN offers significantly more performance than an identically configured Nutanix cluster. We thought IT professionals would find it very useful to see a side-by-side comparison across a wide range of synthetic workloads.
The complete details of the test beds, testing methodology and workload details can be found in the previous post. We also have published our findings regarding Nutanix vs. VSAN pricing.
Towards the end of our testing, however, Nutanix changed their EULA to read as follows:
“You must not disclose the results of testing, benchmarking or other performance or evaluation information related to the Software or the product to any third party without the prior written consent of Nutanix”
So we sent along the details of our test methodologies (plus our Nutanix results) to request written permission as per their EULA.
Nutanix declined their consent for us to publish our head-to-head results. In the spirit of transparency, a sampling of the VSAN-only results appear below.
Interested parties are invited to download VDbench and conduct their own testing. Also, you may be interested in our previous performance paper.
It never seems there’s enough time in the day to sit down and learn about something new and exciting — like VMware Virtual SAN. Even a 15-minute demo can seem long!
To make things easier, we’ve started a new video series “VSAN In 3 Minutes” produced by our own Greg Mulholland. You’ll find them quick, bite-sized and with just enough information to get you going in the right direction.
Also, for your convenience, I’ve included links to the more formal VSAN documentation. Continue reading
When presented a huge differential in acquisition costs for ostensibly similar products, every IT professional inevitably asks the question “why pay more?”
Maybe there’s a good reason for a substantial difference … and maybe not.
We’d like to share with you some preliminary data points we’ve collected around comparative pricing for VMware Virtual SAN and Nutanix.
There’s an important difference in the underlying business models. Nutanix sells a complete, turnkey appliance. VMware VSAN (and vSphere) is software that runs on the customer’s choice of hardware — it’s software-defined storage. Both deliver a hyperconverged solution.
A few caveats before we begin?
In reality, the only prices that matter are the ones that you pay. Portions of the IT industry can be relatively opaque when it comes to finding typical street pricing. Bigger buyers tend to get better prices than smaller buyers. Initial small buys might be priced very competitively if the vendor believes they might lead to larger transactions.
Your mileage may vary — we’ve done our best here!
We’re presenting the data we have, so you can draw your own conclusions. If someone spots an error, please leave a comment and we’ll address it quickly. Continue reading
Every month, we compile a list of the top vSphere Storage posts from the previous month for you to enjoy.
Here are the top Virtual Blocks posts from May:
The Future Of Hyperconverged Is Already Here
Chuck Hollis recently sat down with Gabriel Long to talk about a VSAN cluster that was built that utilizes Diablo’s Memory Channel Storage technology flash storage. Chuck and Gabe talk about this hyperconverged environment and more.
Virtual SAN Health Check Plug-in Now Available
Now generally available is the VMware Virtual SAN Health Check Plug-in. Created to address one of the paint points many storage solutions suffer from, Rafi Kabesa details helpful features of the plug-in, as well as the checks it implements.
What makes VSAN so fast? How does VSAN protect my data? Chuck Hollis discusses a list of interesting questions the Virtual SAN team encounters most often, along with answers for each question. You don’t want to miss this one.
Virtual Volumes: VM-centricity And Why Its Important
With VM-centricity, Virtual Volumes eliminates a costly tradeoff that our customers have faced with traditional storage for years. Juan Novella discusses the concept and importance of VM-centricity.
VAAI Licensing Now Aligned with Virtual Volumes (VVol)
We believe the right way to manage storage is through VM-centric, policy-based management. When it comes to environments with traditional SAN and NAS storage, Virtual Volumes is the way to go. One necessary feature to enable a successful Virtual Volumes implementation is vSphere APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). Mauricio Barra talks about this and more in his blog.
Be sure to subscribe to the Virtual Blocks blog, or follow our social channels at @vmwarevsan and Facebook.com/vmwarevsan for the latest updates.
For more information about VMware Virtual SAN, visit http://www.vmware.com/products/virtualsan.
Many, many factors go into an informed IT purchasing decision. Priorities may vary for different people, but relative performance can matter greatly to many IT buyers when considering alternatives. If the differences are significant and meaningful, it can certainly tilt the scale.
The usual baseline is the core question — is the performance fast enough for what I want to do?
But answering that question is not as easy as it sounds. Real-world workloads can be notoriously difficult to characterize and size reliably. And it’s nice to have a nice margin of performance headroom in case you’ve guessed wrong, or — more likely — the workloads have changed. Nobody likes to hit a wall.
But there’s a deeper level as well. A poorly performing product can require more hardware, licenses and environmentals to match the results of a much better performing product. While not everyone may care about absolute performance, almost everyone would care about having to pay much more to get equivalent work done.
Unfortunately, there is a paucity of good head-to-head performance testing in the marketplace today. Ideally, that would be done by an independent third party, but while we’re waiting for that, we’ve done our own.
To be clear, this isn’t about vendors beating each over the head with benchmarks — it’s about helping IT professionals make informed choices. More data is better.
We’ve already published an extensive set of performance testing for VSAN, but nothing in terms of a direct comparison. We wanted to correct that situation — and here’s what we’re attempting to do. Continue reading
If you already know you want to take part in the beta, sign up here: http://www.vmware.com/go/vrops4vsan-beta
One of the most requested features among Virtual SAN 5.5 customers is enabling greater visibility to what happens “under the hood”. The Virtual SAN team developed a new health check plug-in that will help customers tackle underlying hardware issues as part of the v6.0 release (read more here). In addition to that the vRealize operations team developed an advanced set of dashboards and tools aimed at making Virtual SAN users life much easier.
The storage industry is undergoing rapid structural change that’s not been seen in decades.
My best soundbite is that storage is in the process of collapsing. Once a standalone topic, storage is clearly pulling away from our familiar model of external storage arrays, and disappearing into the fabric of servers and hypervisors.
While we all like to talk about disruptive industry changes, this one perhaps is the ultimate disruption: it impacts every aspect of storage: the core technology, the consumption model, the integration model as well as the operational model.
As a result, most everything we’ve come to know about storage changes going forward. For most people, what you think you know isn’t how it’s going to be before too long.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these “collapses” going on with storage today. Continue reading
IT service providers can be some of the most demanding IT users on the planet.
Why? They serve very demanding customers. And there are plenty of competitors doing similar things.
At the same time, they have to keep a watchful eye on costs, as margins can be thin. Better, faster, cheaper — they demand all three! As a category, IT service providers generally spend serious effort evaluating technology as part of their core business model.
Recently, Duncan Epping posted a deeper look at what IndonesianCloud is doing today with VSAN. So far, they’re quite happy — and are planning to do much more.
An interesting read!
This new reference architecture is base on the latest versions of VMware Horizon View 6.0.2 and VMware Virtual SAN 6.0. Virtual SAN’s 6.0 hybrid storage architecture is the focus of the storage design and configuration with real-world test scenarios, user workloads, and infrastructure system configurations.
The hardware utilized in this reference architecture is based on Extreme Ethernet switches and SuperMicro rack mount servers with locally attached storage devices designed to support a scalable architecture and a cost-effective linked-clone desktop deployment model on VMware vSphere 6.0.
This technical paper highlights the results collected from the extensive user experience and operations testing performed, including Login VSI and desktop performance testing of up-to 1,600 desktops, and desktop provisioning operations of up-to 2,400 desktops.
The performed tests reveal the world-class performance and value of the solution at low cost. Virtual SAN’s technology allows easy scalability while maintaining superior performance at a competitive price point. The official document will be publicly available soon from the VMware technical resources page.
In the meantime, you can get early access to the final draft of the white paper directly from the link below.
– Enjoy
For future updates on Virtual SAN (VSAN), vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVol) and other Software-defined Storage technologies, as well as vSphere + OpenStack, be sure to follow me on Twitter: @PunchingClouds