VMware Virtual SAN

First fully attended session I've attended, and it is being repeated several times during the week.

Scale out storage in the hypervisor natively, not a virtual appliance
HDD, SSD, but requires SSD to perform well
Behaves just like shared storage with all the usual sphere features
Can apply policy based storage management
Distributed RAID, no RAID of physical disks required
Perf and capacity scales linearly as you add nodes to the cluster
Writes to multiple vmdk copies for HA

When deploying a VM:
- vsan checks where there is space for the number of images neede to be created in the array, keeps images separated according to policy
- writes go to all images simultaneously to the SSDs. All writes must complete before it is acknowledged
- data move to HDD a sync later
- if replication is required it is copied from SSD or HDD from the fastest available location

vMotion
- no change, VM moves around the cluster
- if a vMotion cases a performance issue then storage location automatically moved across vSAN whilst maintaining policies

Fault Tolerance
- loss of host - HA will restart vm as normal, waits 30 mins to see if host comes back up, if not vSAN will start creating new copies in the background whilst managing network traffic
Need min 3 servers in cluster.
Min 1 SSD and 1 HDD per host
Recommend 10Gb network
Assumption that virtual networking is in use
Server needs to be on HCL

<Suggested Workloads
- VDI
- Dev / test
- DR target

Performance
- claiming vSAN can deliver same VDI density as all SSD array

Thoughts:
- Great for workloads where compute : storage ratio is fairly constant, e.g. VDI
- if it performs as claimed it will be a game changer for some workloads