Skip to main content

What is VMware vSAN

 🚀 Part 1: What is VMware vSAN?


VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage solution built right into ESXi.

Instead of relying on external SAN/NAS, it combines local disks from hosts into a shared datastore for the cluster.


✨ Why it matters:

 • 🗑️ No need for external arrays

 • ⚡ High performance with SSD/NVMe

 • 📈 Scale just by adding hosts

 • 🎛️ Managed directly in vSphere


⸻


🔎 Architecture & Building Blocks

At the heart of vSAN are a few simple components:

 • 🖥️ ESXi Hosts → Each host contributes local disks

 • 🖴 Disk Groups → Made of cache (SSD) + capacity (HDD/SSD)

 • 📦 vSAN Datastore → Pooled storage, visible to all hosts

 • 📋 Storage Policies → Decide availability, replication, and performance per VM


💡 This architecture means your storage is flexible, policy-driven, and fully integrated with VMware’s ecosystem.


⸻


👉 Best Practice: Start small with 3–4 hosts, but always design for growth — vSAN scales linearly by simply adding more servers.


⚙️ Part 2: How vSAN Works + Use Cases


Each ESXi host adds its local disks → vSAN mirrors/stripes data across nodes → you get performance + resilience.


🔧 Core Components:

 • 🖴 Cache Tier → SSDs for speed

 • 💽 Capacity Tier → HDDs/SSDs for storage

 • 📋 Storage Policies → Decide replication & performance per VM


📌 Use Cases:

 • 🖥️ Virtual Desktops (VDI)

 • 🗄️ Databases & ERP

 • 🌍 Edge/Remote sites

 • 🌐 Disaster Recovery (stretched clusters)


👉 Best Practice: Go all-flash for speed, and enable deduplication & compression for efficiency.


💡 Part 3: Why Choose vSAN?


VMware vSAN is more than just storage – it’s a business enabler.

While traditional SAN/NAS solutions need separate hardware, cables, and management, vSAN is built into the hypervisor and scales with your compute layer.


⸻


🔥 Top Advantages of vSAN:

 • 💰 Cost Efficiency → No external storage arrays, fewer vendors to manage

 • ⚡ Fast Deployment → Storage ready in minutes, provisioned directly from vSphere

 • 🎯 Policy-Based Management → Define per-VM policies (availability, performance, protection)

 • ☁️ Cloud Integration → Native part of VMware Cloud Foundation & hybrid cloud strategies

 • 📈 Scalability → Expand by simply adding ESXi hosts

 • 🛡️ Data Protection → Features like RAID 1/5/6, stretched clusters, and fault domains


⸻


🔎 Real-World Impact

 • 🏢 Enterprises → Simplify storage ops and cut datacenter costs

 • 🌍 Remote/Edge Sites → Eliminate the need for complex SAN gear

 • ☁️ Hybrid Cloud Users → Extend on-prem vSAN to VMware Cloud seamlessly


⸻


👉 Best Practice:

 • Use 10GbE (or higher) dedicated networks for vSAN traffic.

 • Continuously monitor with vSAN Health Check & Skyline for proactive issue detection.

 • Align storage policies with business SLAs — not all workloads need the same level of redundancy.


⸻


⚡ In short: VMware vSAN simplifies infrastructure, reduces costs, and makes organizations cloud-ready — all while being managed from the same vSphere platform you already know.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Quick Guide to VCF Automation for VCD Administrators

  Quick Guide to VCF Automation for VCD Administrators VMware Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF 9) has been  released  and with it comes brand new Cloud Management Platform –  VCF Automation (VCFA)  which supercedes both Aria Automation and VMware Cloud Director (VCD). This blog post is intended for those people that know VCD quite well and want to understand how is VCFA similar or different to help them quickly orient in the new direction. It should be emphasized that VCFA is a new solution and not just rebranding of an old one. However it reuses a lot of components from its predecessors. The provider part of VCFA called Tenenat Manager is based on VCD code and the UI and APIs will be familiar to VCD admins, while the tenant part inherist a lot from Aria Automation and especially for VCD end-users will look brand new. Deployment and Architecture VCFA is generaly deployed from VCF Operations Fleet Management (former Aria Suite LCM embeded in VCF Ops. Fleet Management...
Post a Comment
Read more
  Issue with Aria Automation Custom form Multi Value Picker and Data Grid https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleNumber=345960 Products VMware Aria Suite Issue/Introduction Symptoms: Getting  error " Expected Type String but was Object ", w hen trying to use Complex Types in MultiValue Picker on the Aria for Automation Custom Form. Environment VMware vRealize Automation 8.x Cause This issue has been identified where the problem appears when a single column Multi Value Picker or Data Grid is used. Resolution This is a known issue. There is a workaround.  Workaround: As a workaround, try adding one empty column in the Multivalue picker without filling the options. So we can add one more column without filling the value which will be hidden(there is a button in the designer page that will hide the column). This way the end user will receive the same view.  
Post a Comment
Read more
  "Cloud zone insights not available yet, please check after some time" message on Aria Automation https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleNumber=314894 Products VMware Aria Suite Issue/Introduction Symptoms: The certificate for Aria operations has been replaced since it was initially added to Aria Automation as an integration. When accessing the Insights pane under  Cloud Assembly  ->  Infrastructure  ->  Cloud Zone  ->  Insights  the following message is displayed:   "Cloud zone insights not available yet, please check after some time." The  /var/log/services-logs/prelude/hcmp-service-app/file-logs/hcmp-service-app.log  file contains ssl errors similar to:   2022-08-25T20:06:43.989Z ERROR hcmp-service [host='hcmp-service-app-xxxxxxx-xxxx' thread='Thread-56' user='' org='<org_id>' trace='<trace_id>' parent='<parent_id>' span='<span_id>'] c.v.a.h.a.common.AlertEnu...
Post a Comment
Read more