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.
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
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!
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?
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.
Continue reading
For more than a few IT shops, data-at-rest encryption is mandatory for many of their workloads. It’s one of those things that just isn’t up for discussion.
While VSAN currently supports hardware encryption that’s largely transparent to VSAN (or anything else that uses an internal storage device), many customers have expressed a desire for a more fully-featured solution that encrypts at a VM level, has sophisticated key management and policies, and can protect a VM wherever it happens to go.
To meet that need for sophisticated functionality, we’ve been partnering with HyTrust for a while. The product strikes me as a unique combination of simplicity and power — just like VSAN.
Cormac Hogan just posted a nice walk-through showing just how easy it is to set it up. A while back, Rawlinson Rivera also did a nice write-up.
Bottom line: if you’re looking at software-defined encryption to go with your software-defined data center, you should take a moment to understand what HyTrust can offer.
Everyone who works with storage technology eventually gets around to wishing for the same thing: wouldn’t it be GREAT if we could round up ALL the similar products, and put them through their paces?
Reality intrudes, however. Getting a bunch of storage vendors to loan you their expensive arrays — all at the same time — is almost impossible, unless you’ve got a very big transaction to leverage.
Finding the time and the space to do the testing is another issue as well — it’s rare that someone with the right skills has the luxury to spend several weeks doing array testing.
However, things worked out well for Jay Scheponik of JKS Consulting, Inc. (jayscheponik@gmail.com). He was contracted to do just that — put up a raft of comparable storage solutions, and see how they performed head-to-head.
Not only was he able to evaluate the usual external array suspects, but he also was able to test newer hyperconverged products, like VSAN.
Needless to say, we were very interested in his findings. I was lucky enough to get Jay on the phone to ask a few questions. Continue reading
The great part of the VMware hyperconverged model is that it’s software-centric, which means customers get the benefit of great hardware partners who are always upping their game.
Today’s interesting VSAN performance results come from Dell. Recently, they engaged with Principled Technologies to benchmark a Dell FX2 stuffed with SanDisk flash against a similar HP server using an external storage array.
It wasn’t even close, folks.
Let’s step behind the scenes, if you’re interested? Continue reading
Sizing a new cluster can be a challenging exercise, especially if you don’t know your workloads well.
While we’ve always had decent rule-of-thumb estimators, there’s nothing as good as collecting real data and using the results to size your configuration.
Our own Simon Todd (aka Mr. VSAN) shares some background on the new VIP (virtualization infrastructure planning) tool, which also includes capacity and performance sizing for VSAN, now in beta.
We’re looking for customers and partners to give it a go: download the collector, gather data to the SaaS analyzer, and review the results. Our goal is to make infrastructure sizing as easy (and as accurate!) as it can be.
Let us know what you think!
Here’s the headline: VMware’s Virtual SAN fundamentally changes the way vSphere administrators do storage. It’s a new world.
While there’s a ton of good material out there, we thought we’d boil things down to the bare essentials for all you busy IT professionals.
Here’s what you need to know: Continue reading
When VMware introduced VSAN 6, we were pretty clear: it’s a great fit for most anything that runs in a virtual machine, including critical databases.
Whereas much of our previously published performance testing focused on a large number of VMs pounding the storage subsystem (as that’s the norm for how most people use clusters), databases usually have a different performance profile: typically you have a small number of larger VMs that are doing all the heavy lifting.
Not long ago, one of our engineer teams completed a performance profile using both Oracle 11g and Oracle RAC 11 against a modest, 4-node all-flash VSAN cluster. All-flash makes great sense when you want predictably fast performance, regardless of the IO profile.
TL; DR — wicked fast and predictable performance, Oracle RAC scaled linearly as more instances were added, and all of the tested Oracle RAC availability features worked exactly as expected.
Note: if you’re planning to use Oracle RAC with VSAN 6, there’s a KB you’ll need to read about configuring VSAN for multi-writer .
And a big thanks to our friends at Intel for all the help with providing an environment for these tests! Continue reading