Why Should We Use Virtual San

Avatar photo
Anthony Lewis

Why Should I Use VMware Virtual San?

I see a lot of questions asking, “Why should we use VMware VSAN?” First, let me give an overly simplistic explanation of what a Virtual SAN does. Virtual SAN uses hard drives or SSDs in group of servers to create a group of storage volumes. Imagine a RAID array across different servers. Redundancy and distribution of resources can yield up to 99.999% uptime, and there are tunable failure tolerance settings. Add in snapshots, compression, deduplication, inter-site replication, and SSD caching for I/O performance, and VMware Virtual SAN is a real and valid SAN solution.

 

THE $$$

The first reason to choose Virtual SAN is that it costs approximately 50% the cost of traditional SAN implementation. Fibre channel switches and HBAs and switches are no longer required, although ethernet to the servers of at least 10Gbps is recommended. Proprietary storage arrays are no longer needed, so hardware costs are much lower than typical SAN implementations. Licensing with many SAN solution software solutions is also based on features or the amount of storage needed. VSAN is licensed per CPU socket.

 

USE YOUR STORAGE

By allowing the Virtual SAN to use the direct attached storage in each server, local server storage is not wasted. Without VSAN, when shared storage is needed for high availability, local storage on the servers is often wasted. Then, without VSAN, there are times when one host has most of its storage free, while another host is 95% full. With Virtual SAN, this becomes a volume of shared storage.

 

FLEXIBILITY AND SCALING

A big reason to choose Virtual SAN is that it scales well horizontally out to as many as 64 hosts per cluster and scales up above 8PB. IOPS can exceed 100,000 per host with flash storage. As a part of the software-defined datacenter (SDDC), the hosts are used for hosting VMs as well as the VSAN. This cuts down dramatically on hardware expenditures for a dedicated SAN.

New Resources In Your Inbox

Get our latest cybersecurity resources, content, tips and trends.

Other resources that might be of interest to you.

Rebuild Your Business After an Attack: Threat Actors Webinar

 Rebuild Your Business: Webinar Summary Airiam and MOXFIVE wrapped up the second of our Threat Actors webinar series! Art Ocain and Ben Hartwick were great hosts walking us through a ton of information on how to rebuild your business after an attack.
Vivian Lee
>>Read More

Podcast: Basics of Cybersecurity and What You’re Securing

 In our latest podcast, Basics of Cybersecurity and What You’re Securing, we interviewed Pat Gorman, a seasoned cybersecurity professional. With over 18 years in IT, he shares valuable insights for aspiring professionals. Pat excels in team man
Vivian Lee
>>Read More

Stop Cyber Werewolves: The Importance of Identity Management

Imagine a cybercriminal as a werewolf—a shape-shifting predator that blends into the shadows, hiding its true nature until it strikes. These cyber werewolves use clever tactics to steal your identity and impersonate you, wreaking havoc within your comp
Vivian Lee
>>Read More