In our last 2 posts of this series we discussed about VSAN Architecture and walked through steps needed to configure VSAN. If you have missed earlier posts of this series you can read them from here:

1: Overview and Architecture of VSAN

2: Installation and Configuration

In this post we will discuss Storage Policies and its role in a vSAN environment.

Storage policy based management and implementation is an important part of software defined storage and software defined datacenter. VMware vSAN is one of the most robust and most complete implementation of storage policy based management.

When you use Virtual SAN, you can define virtual machine storage requirements, such as performance and availability, in the form of a policy. The policy requirements are then pushed down to the Virtual SAN layer when a virtual machine is being created. The virtual disk is distributed across the Virtual SAN datastore to meet the requirements.… Read More

In our last post Overview and Architecture of VSAN we learnt what vSAN is. Why one should use vSAN in their environment and what is the architecture of vSAN.

In this post we will look at how to install and configure VSAN in lab/production environment.

Note: I am using vSAN 6.X in my lab.

Installation Requirements:

VMware KB-2106708 list all the requirements for installing VSAN 6.X in a greater details. Here are the minimum requirements to build a VSAN Lab:

1: Minimum of 3 ESXi 6.0 host that will contribute to storage.

2:At least one SSD and one Hard Disk per host

3: VMkernel port configured for VSAN traffic

4: 1 GB network for small environment Lab/test (For Production VMware recommends 10GB)

vSAN uses Esxi hosts locally attached storage to create a clustered datastore. vSAN is a software feature which is built into the hypervisor (Esxi).

VSAN can be used in 2 mode: hybrid or all-flash.… Read More

This week a new program “VSAN vExpert” was launched for vExpert’s and I was all excited to be a part of the VSAN vexpert community. I was thinking about learning VSAN since a while but due to time constraints I was not able to do so. Launch of this vExpert program provided me an opportunity to finally test my hands on highly talked VSAN.

Lets begin with Introduction of VSAN and we will look into its architecture and will see why it is becoming so popular among administrators these days.

What is VMware VSAN?

VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) is a hypervisor-converged storage solution for your vSphere environment. It was built to be extremely easy to use and administrator, high performance and expandable.

VMware Virtual SAN is a new software-defined storage tier for VMware vSphere, bringing the benefits of the software defined data center to storage. By clustering server hard disk and solid state drives (HDDs and SSDs), Virtual SAN creates a flash-optimized, highly resilient shared datastore designed for virtual environments.… Read More