Our journey continues!

Previously, I detailed how we were curious as to how two identically configured clusters — one vSphere/VSAN and one vSphere/Nutanix — might stack up in terms of relative cost and performance.  The comparisons were eye-opening, especially for those of us who have spent time studying storage performance.

We hit a snag along the way, as Nutanix recently changed their EULA to expressly prohibit any form of publishing performance results without prior written permission.  We applied for permission to publish, and they declined.

However, we still have useful data to share! Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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 →

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.

  Continue reading →