We just started implementation, so it's hard to give our perspective as we're still doing our evaluation. We purchased the product, and we have ten-fold service on it.
If it works out well, storage is our most important element of our infrastructure. We're looking for a stable and high performing solution and think this is it.
I'd like to see support for iSCI. Right now it’s all internal protocols, and they promise it in the next version. They need to support more types of hardware – the list is too narrow.
It's stable, but it's really picky on the hardware. We knew that going in, but the scale was a surprise, not truly as agnostic as we thought it would be. They have a list, and if you deviate a bit, then it won’t support the environment. We had an issue where we deviated slightly, so we probably will have to follow their hardware compatibility list.
Very scalable, it's one of the reasons we bought it. They are in v2.0, and we feel like now it’s mature.
Support is generally good, but a little slow sometimes. You need to stick to their compatibility list if you want their full support.
We were using EMC and we knew we needed something new. Cost is important to look at, because we're nonprofit, as well as the integration with the other VMware products, and the stability of the product too.
Setup is very straightforward.
It’s a good solution – the trend is going towards converged infrastructure. It's all policy based – you can set general policy and then trust VSAN to do everything else.
Originally posted in Spanish at https://www.rhpware.com/2015/02/introduccion-vmware...
The second generation of Virtual SAN is the vSphere 6.0 that comes with sharing the same version number. While the jump from version 1.0 (vSphere 5.5) 6.0 to change really worth it occurred, as this second-generation converged storage integrated into the VMware hypervisor significantly increases performance and features that are based on a much higher performance and increased workloads scale business level, including business-critical applications and Tier 1 capital.
Virtual SAN 6.0 delivers a new architecture based entirely on Flash to deliver high performance and predictable response times below one millisecond in almost all business critical applications level. This is also achieved because in this version doubles the scalability up to 64 nodes per host and up to 200 VMs per host, as well as improvements in technology snapshots and cloning.
The hybrid architecture of Virtual SAN 6.0 provides performance improvements of nearly double compared to the previous version and 6.0 Virtual SAN architecture all-flash four times the performance considering the number of IOPS you get in clusters with similar workloads predictable and low latency.
As the hyper convergent architecture is included in the hypervisor efficiently optimizes the ratio of operations of I/O and dramatically minimizes the impact on the CPU, which leads to products from other companies. The distributed architecture based on the hypervisor reduces bottlenecks allowing Virtual SAN move data and run operations I/O in a much more streamlined and very low latencies, without compromising the computing resources of the platform and keeping the consolidation of the VM's. Also the data store Virtual SAN is highly resilient, resulting in preventing data loss in case of physical failure of disk, hosts, network or racks.
The Virtual SAN distributed architecture allows you to scale elastically uninterrupted. Both capacity and performance can be scaled at the same time when a new host is added to a cluster, and can also scale independently simply by adding disks existing hosts.
The major new capabilities of Virtual SAN 6.0 features include:
Virtual SAN 6.0 All-Flash predictable levels of performance achieved up to 100,000 IOPS per host and response times below one millisecond, making it ideal for critical workloads. - See more at: https://www.rhpware.com/2015/02/introduccion-vmware...
This version duplicates the capabilities of the previous version:
Virtual SAN 6.0 requires vCenter Server 6.0. Both the Windows version as visa Virtual SAN can handle. Virtual SAN 6.0 is configurable and monitored exclusively through vSphere Web Client. It also requires a minimum of 3 vSphere hosts with local storage. This amount is not arbitrary, but is used for the cluster meets the fault tolerance requirements of at least one host, a disc network failure.
Each vSphere host own contribution to the cluster storage Virtual SAN requires a driver disk, which can be SAS, SATA (HBA) or RAID controller. However, a RAID controller must operate in any of the following ways:
The Pass-through (JBOD or HBA) is the preferred mode settings 6.0 Virtual SAN that enables managing RAID configurations the attributes of storage policies and performance requirements defined in a virtual machine
When the hybrid architecture of Virtual SAN 6.0 is used, each vSphere host must have at least one SAS, NL-SAS or SATA disk in order to participate in the Virtual Cluster SAN cluster.
In architecture-based flash drives 6.0 Virtual SAN devices can be used as a layer of cache as well as for persistent storage. In hybrid architectures each host must have at least a flash based (SAS, SATA or PCI-E) in order to participate in the Virtual SAN disk cluster.
In the All-flash architecture each vSphere host must have at least one flash based device marked as device capacity and one for performance in order to participate Virtual SAN cluster.
In hybrid architectures Virtual SAN, each vSphere host must have at least one network adapter 1Gb or 10Gb. VMware's recommendation is 10 Gb.
The All-flash architectures only support 10Gb Ethernet NICs. For redundancy and high availability, you can configure NIC Teaming per host. NIC Teaming is not supported for link aggregation (performance).
Virtual SAN 6.0 is supported by both VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) and the vSphere Standard Switch (VSS). Other virtual switches are not supported in this release.
You must create a VMkernel port on each host for communicating and labelled for Virtual SAN Virtual SAN traffic. This new interface is used for intracluster communications as well as for read and write operations when a vSphere cluster host is the owner of a particular VM but the current data blocks are housed in a remote cluster host.
In this case, the operations of I / O network must travel through the cluster hosts. If this network interface on a vDS is created, you can use the Network feature I / O control to configure shares or reservations for Virtual SAN traffic.
This new second generation Virtual SAN is a storage solution enterprise-class hypervisor level that combines computing resources and storage from the hosts. With its two supported architectures (hybrid and All-Flash) Virtual SAN 6.0 meets the demands of all virtualized applications, including business-critical applications.
Without doubt Virtual SAN 6.0 is a storage solution that realizes the VMWare defined storage software or SDS (Software Defined Storage) offering great benefits to both customers and the vSphere administrators who every day we face new challenges and complexities. It certainly is an architecture that will change the vision of storage systems from now on.
Originally posted at vcdx133.com.
I previously posted about my “Baby Dragon Triplets” VSAN Home Lab that I recently built. One of the design requirements was to meet 5,000 IOPS @ 4K 50/50 R/W, 100% Random, which from the performance testing below has been met.
The performance testing was executed with two tools:
Iometer – Test configuration
Iometer – Results
VMware I/O Analyser – Test configuration
VMware I/O Analyser – Results
Observations
