VSAN Part 4 – Understanding Objects and Components

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]

VSAN Part 3 – It is not a Virtual Storage Appliance

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…

VSAN Part 2 – What do you need to get started?

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…

Simplivity – OmniStack & OmniCube updates

SimpliVity are another storage vendor I highly recommend that you check out at VMworld 2013. I wrote an article about them prior to VMworld 2012. Essentially, SimpliVity wanted to stop the sprawl of appliances in your data center and to that end, they ship an appliance that takes care all of these functions (dedupe, backup, I/O acceleration, etc). The bonus is that you do not have idle resources/appliances hanging around when that particular function is not being used. They have just announced new enhancements to their OmniStack software and have introduced a number of new OmniCube hardware models. I caught…