Shared storage is basically a set of storage devices that are connected to and used by two or more systems. The most commonly used term in IT departments for this shared storage is SAN (Storage area network). Typically a storage area network is part of the overall network of computing resources for an enterprise and it would contain separate storage units connected to the ESXi host(s) via Fibre Channel, iSCSI or configured as a NFS. In a VMware ESXi environment the storage is divided into volumes and some or all of these volumes are then presented to ESXi hosts simultaneously. The VMware administrator can then decide hether to create VMFS data stores on these volumes or present them as raw device mappings to individual virtual machines. Typically the storage devices come with their own configuration, administration and/or monitor software that can be used in addition to VMware tools already available in a VMware virtual environment.
VMware Virtual SAN is a new feature from VMware that allows you to create a clustered data store from the storage (SSD and HDD drives) that is present in the ESXi hosts. The Virtual SAN storage cluster must be made up of at least three ESXi servers. VMware Virtual SAN is built into the ESXi 5.5 hypervisor and can be used with ESXi hosts that are configured with PERC RAID controllers or with LSI adapters. To be able to use Virtual SAN, you will need at least one SSD and one HDD in each of the servers participating in the Virtual SAN cluster and it’s important to note that the SSD doesn’t contribute to the storage capacity. The SSDs are used for read cache and write buffering whereas the HDD’s are there to offer persistent storage.
Virtual SAN is highly available as it’s based on the distributed object-based RAIN (redundant array of independent nodes) architecture. Virtual SAN is fully integrated with vSphere. It aims to simplify storage placement decisions for vSphere administrators and its goal is to provide both high availability as well as scale out storage functionality.
VMware Virtual SAN offers an easy to configure, highly redundant, high performance storage system without the need to purchase any additional hardware. Performance should mimic single hop iSCSI with very high throughput and no bottlenecks.
To read an indepth analysis of VMware Virtual SAN with Dell hardware please follow this link
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