VMware has announced
vSphere Storage Appliance for more than a year now. For whatever reason you
might not have looked at the product, this post is to make a point that VSA is
a great product; works well and in its latest iteration it has addressed a lot
of the shortcomings of the previous releases.
Let's take a look at
what the product is targeted at. It is a really good fit for SMB where getting
even an entry level SAN is cost prohibitive. The architecture of a VSA cluster
includes the physical servers that have local hard disks, ESXi as the operating
system of the physical servers, and the vSphere Storage Appliance virtual
machines that run clustering services to create volumes that are exported as
the VSA datastores via NFS.
Benefits:
- No SAN needed
- Simple to implement
- Low Cost
- Licensed with vSphere Essentials Plus Kit
- Can add disks to expand the capacity of cluster (ver. 5 feature)
- Can be deployed in brownfield or greenfield implementation (brownfield ver. 5 feature)
Shortcomings:
- Comes in a two node and three node (hosts) version only
- Once implemented you cannot add a node (host) to add compute at future date
- Needs a physical box for vCenter to hold the quorum in a two node deployment
There is a very good
evaluation
guide written by Cormac Hogan. Rawlinson Rivera has done some commendable
work over here
explaining details surrounding brownfield deployments. This would be very
helpful for people who already have existing VMs in the environment on
individual hosts.
In summary, you get
all the enterprise level features (vMotion and High Availability) at a
relatively low cost. Moreover no SAN and SAN management skills needed.
