One of the most important concepts to understand in VSAN, in my opinion, is the notion of storage objects and components. Virtual Machines deployed on a vsanDatastore on VSAN 5.5 may have 4 different kinds of storage objects associated with it: The Virtual Machine home or “namespace directory” A swap object (if the virtual machine is powered on) Virtual disks/VMDKs Delta-disks created for snapshots. Each delta-disk is an object. [Update: Additional objects types were introduced in later versions of VSAN, but these were the objects in VSAN 5.5]
I’ve actually had to change the order of VSAN posts just to make this very point – VSAN is NOT a Virtual Storage Appliance. I’ve seen multiple conversations on twitter, and some blog posts, which are completely inaccurate when it comes to this point. VSAN is completely and fully integrated into vSphere. There are no appliances to push down and no additional VIBs to install on ESXi version 5.5 and vCenter 5.5 – VSAN is built into vSphere as kernel modules. Now, Frank Denneman wrote an excellent article explaining the advantages of kernel modules over appliances here. I’d suggest reading…
This post contains the list of items you will need to get started with VSAN. I’ll also try to highlight some best practices when it comes to configuring VSAN. First off, lets start with the software requirements – those are the easy bits. You will need ESXi version 5.5 and vCenter server version 5.5. The vCenter server can be either the Windows version or the appliance version; both support VSAN. Finally you will need to familiarize yourself with the vSphere web client if you haven’t already done so. VSAN can only be managed from the vSphere web client; it is…
At last, VSAN is launched. Over the coming weeks and months, I plan on doing a series of VSAN (or Virtual SAN to be more accurate) posts. I will start with a brief introduction to the product which was announced at VMworld 2013 with a public beta.
Nutanix just announced the availability of NOS 3.5. It has been approximately 6 months since I posted about their NOS 3.0 release which had a lot of cool features. I was curious to see what they added to 3.5, especially from a VMware integration perspective.
The answer right now is no, but if you are interested in how this query came about, and why I decided to blog about it, continue reading. It has something for those of you interested in some of the underlying workings of Storage DRS.
Another storage vendor that I finally managed to catch up with at this year’s VMware Partner Exchange was Tegile. I was curious about the name, and I learnt that Tegile was a merging of the terms Technology and Agility. Tegile is another vendor that I have seen at various events, but have not had an opportunity to catch up with them in person and learn about their products. This time, I got an opportunity to catch up with Rob Commins (VP of Marketing) and Mike Recker of Tegile, and put a few questions to them.