Over the last couple of weeks we have received various questions on Virtual SAN licensing and Packaging for Virtual SAN 6.1. A lot of the questions were around the “ROBO” and the “Stretched Cluster” use case. We are hoping that the below table will clarify any confusion / questions you may have. Before you go on and read the table, there are a couple of things we want to explicitly call out.
- “Stretched Cluster” refers to the “Stretched Cluster” product workflow. Two rooms within the same building using the stretched cluster functionality requires “Virtual SAN Advanced”. Datacenters across multiple buildings leveraging regular “fault domain” functionality does not require Advanced, but can use Standard instead!
- “Virtual SAN Advanced” is included in the “Horizon Advanced” and the “Horizon Enterprise” suites, this means you get “all-flash” and “stretched cluster” functionality as part of your Horizon Advanced/Enterprise suite.
- You can deploy a 2-node ROBO (plus witness) configuration using Standard, Advanced or the special “Virtual SAN for ROBO” 25VM pack. It does not require the “Stretched Cluster” feature.
The below table shows what the current licensing/packaging looks like for Virtual SAN 6.1. If a new version is released with new functionality we will update this table and article accordingly. Note that in the past there was a “hybrid” and “all-flash” license, these have been renamed to “standard” and “advanced” respectively. For pricing, please contact your partner or a VMware sales rep.
| VSAN Standard | VSAN Advanced | VSAN for ROBO 25 VM Pack |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| SPBM | X | X | X |
| Read/Write SSD Caching | X | X | X |
| Distributed RAID | X | X | X |
| Distributed Switch | X | X | X |
| VSAN Snapshots / Clones | X | X | X |
| Fault Domains | X | X | X |
| Health Monitoring | X | X | X |
| vROps Management Pack | X(new in 6.1) | X(new in 6.1) | X (new in 6.1) |
| vSphere Replication * | X (new in 6.1) | X (new in 6.1) | X (new in 6.1) |
| Stretched Cluster | X (new in 6.1) | ||
| All-Flash | X |
* vSphere Replication is new with a 5 minute RPO, this was exclusive certified for Virtual SAN. In some material you will see this being referred too as VSAN Replication.
