A closer look at EBS-backed vSAN

At VMworld 2018, we announced an initiative to use EBS, Amazon Elastic Block Store, for vSAN storage. At present vSAN is configured using the current EC2 i3 configurations, which run ESXi on bare-metal. I have seen these referred to as i3p, but my understanding is that they correlate to the i3.metal instances as shown here. The Amazon EC2 i3 instances include Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSD-based instance storage. These are configured with 10TB of storage per host, but there are some limitations. For one, if you wish to expand on capacity, you need to add another complete EC2 i3 instance.…