Pros/Cons: vSAN vs SAN
Deathmage
Banned Posts: 2,496
Hey All,
So I was talking with a VMware regional sales rep that I had come out to the location today to discuss my future plans for VMware and the solutions I need now and I got to talking about SAN storage is about 10 months and my biggest reason for holding off the SAN to last was the $25k entry-level cost of a SAN, the Dell Equalogic 6100s, and we got to talking about my current IOPS and he mentioned vSAN. .....In 5.5 vSAN is no longer just isolated to taking over a entire host now you can spread it across multiple arrays on hosts inside of a vCenter cluster and maybe that new since to me vSAN in the past usually ate the whole server and it wasn't usable for anything else.
My question is this, if my IOPS dictate that having internal 10k SAS drives (logic is if I got with 10k drives I can use 1.2 TB drives so while I don't need that now, having larger platter space with less data would equate to faster read times since the platters are bigger vs using 15k SAS drives which only go to 600GB's thus making my overall array smaller) which @ 6GB's (on the backplane) caps out at like 1100 and my current IOPS for my most demanding server is SQL @ 800 IOPS at peak would going with a vSAN solution be better, cost-wise, that deploying a full-fledged SAN array with 10 Gbit switching fabric?
I know now I'm getting into the statistical aspect of things now, but do any of you have real-world application of vSAN vs SAN and know what I'm asking and can share your experiences.
So I was talking with a VMware regional sales rep that I had come out to the location today to discuss my future plans for VMware and the solutions I need now and I got to talking about SAN storage is about 10 months and my biggest reason for holding off the SAN to last was the $25k entry-level cost of a SAN, the Dell Equalogic 6100s, and we got to talking about my current IOPS and he mentioned vSAN. .....In 5.5 vSAN is no longer just isolated to taking over a entire host now you can spread it across multiple arrays on hosts inside of a vCenter cluster and maybe that new since to me vSAN in the past usually ate the whole server and it wasn't usable for anything else.
My question is this, if my IOPS dictate that having internal 10k SAS drives (logic is if I got with 10k drives I can use 1.2 TB drives so while I don't need that now, having larger platter space with less data would equate to faster read times since the platters are bigger vs using 15k SAS drives which only go to 600GB's thus making my overall array smaller) which @ 6GB's (on the backplane) caps out at like 1100 and my current IOPS for my most demanding server is SQL @ 800 IOPS at peak would going with a vSAN solution be better, cost-wise, that deploying a full-fledged SAN array with 10 Gbit switching fabric?
I know now I'm getting into the statistical aspect of things now, but do any of you have real-world application of vSAN vs SAN and know what I'm asking and can share your experiences.
Comments
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Essendon
Member Posts: 4,546 ■■■■■■■■■■
AFAIK, VSAN needs a flash disk to work. VMware have come up with an all-flash VSAN now too. Usually people deploy VSANs for demanding applications, not for every workload because of the costs involved. A SAN may not go away entirely any time soon unless you go hyperconverged with Nutanix/Simplivity/Tintri etc..