VSAN so far in production environments?

jdancer

So, I've been upgrading vSphere 5.x environments to vSphere 6 one site at a time. One of the things the boss wants to know if VSAN is really ready for production use. We do use external SANs but we plan on creating new additional remote sites.

It's one more less hardware maintenance issue to deal with. So, is anyone here using VSAN in production? What's your experience so far? Looking at third-party solutions is not an option due to contractual obligations with client requirements. So, in summary, it's not a capital expenditure issue.

mu5ic92

jdancer wrote: »

So, I've been upgrading vSphere 5.x environments to vSphere 6 one site at a time. One of the things the boss wants to know if VSAN is really ready for production use. We do use external SANs but we plan on creating new additional remote sites.

It's one more less hardware maintenance issue to deal with. So, is anyone here using VSAN in production? What's your experience so far? Looking at third-party solutions is not an option due to contractual obligations with client requirements. So, in summary, it's not a capital expenditure issue.

I know my company uses it but mainly for test environment and mainly because of how easy it is to create a VSAN and provide it to several host. I do know one requirement is that atleast %10 of you storage must be SSD storage.

Lexluethar

We are looking into vvols but haven't implemented anything yet. Going to test them out this winter on a few volumes.

TheProf

jdancer wrote: »

So, I've been upgrading vSphere 5.x environments to vSphere 6 one site at a time. One of the things the boss wants to know if VSAN is really ready for production use. We do use external SANs but we plan on creating new additional remote sites.

It's one more less hardware maintenance issue to deal with. So, is anyone here using VSAN in production? What's your experience so far? Looking at third-party solutions is not an option due to contractual obligations with client requirements. So, in summary, it's not a capital expenditure issue.

Definitely worth it. VMware already has many customers using VSAN and seems to be doing a great job for what it is and how cost effective the solution can be compared to the traditional SAN deployments.

I work as a consultant, so for customers looking to do VDI or hosting any other workload intensive apps I recommend VSAN. Although to be honest, in my area, not many use VSAN yet, which I find kind of sad considering the potential it has, but it will pick up, I am sure.

Stretched Clusters
Remote Office / Branch Office deployments of only two nodes
All-Flash / Hybrid Arrays
Already installed by default (just needs to be enabled)

Can't really go wrong.

Only thing, is that you'd have to be careful with how you spec the solution and make sure to use supported servers and RAID controllers.

Essendon

mu5ic92 wrote: »

I do know one requirement is that atleast %10 of you storage must be SSD storage.

VSAN 6 does all flash if you are so inclined. Just FYI.

The Prof has nailed it, VSAN is pretty cool. Like he said, you have to go with supported controllers and other hardware which is a given but there've been instance where folks have used whitebox machines and then wondered why VSAN didn't live up to expectations. Just with anything out there, make sure you:

- test every failure scenario applicable to your environment
- use the right policy
- choose wisely the automatic selection of disks

so there are no gotchas.

discount81

I found it pretty expensive doing it with all HP hardware, we only needed about 100TB and it was going to be a lot more money than just buying something else from EMC.