No SAN ... No Problem! VMware VSA @ work

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.