VMware Virtual SAN Finally Available and Priced

VMware, Inc. announced the availability of Virtual SAN, its first software-defined storage product.

Built into the vSphere kernel, Virtual SAN provides a new tier of hypervisor-converged storage. The software abstracts and pools internal magnetic disks and flash devices from industry-standard x86 servers to produce a high-performance and resilient shared datastore for VMs (VMs).

According to internal benchmarks, Virtual SAN performs:

• 2 million IO/s on a read-only workload on a 32 node cluster; (2 million IO/s on read-only workloads achieved on 32 node VMware Virtual SAN cluster, based on IOmeter benchmark, February 2014) and,
• 640,000 IO/s on a mixed workload on a 32 node cluster (640,000 IO/s on mixed workloads  – Mixed = 70 percent/30% R/W, 4K 80% random – achieved on 32 node Virtual SAN cluster, based on IOmeter benchmark, February 2014)

“Today VMware changes the way that storage has been operated to date,” said John Gilmartin, VP and GM, SDDC suite business unit, VMware. “VMware Virtual SAN is a simple storage solution optimized for virtual environments that brings an application-centric approach to storage management. Customers that know vSphere know VMware Virtual SAN, and can rely on that familiarity to hit the ground running with VMware Virtual SAN.”

“VMware Virtual SAN enables us to scale our storage infrastructure and gives us the redundancy we require to help bring our solutions to market faster to our Line of Business customers,” said Frans Van Rooyen, cloud architect, Adobe Systems Incorporated. “With VMware Virtual SAN, we use policy based management to automate storage aggregation across a large distributed environment while maintaining the same hardware platforms we know and use today.”

“With VMware Virtual SAN, Itrica now has the capability to right-size storage solutions for our customers,” said David Sampson, CTO, Itrica. “We can custom engineer IO, and scale on demand as customer capacity needs grow. Having a hypervisor-converged storage solution that’s spread across our host machines, replicating data all the time, and operating in a similar model to how compute virtualization works, makes perfect sense for what we’re trying to accomplish.“

High-Performance Storage for VMs
Virtual SAN simplifies storage provisioning and management while reducing TCO enabling a fundamentally more agile operational model. It provides the reliability and robustness of an enterprise storage system, and is resilient protecting against data loss in the event of any hardware failures. It is suited for several use cases in virtual environments such as VDI, test/development, and DR.

Features include:

• Hypervisor-converged architecture: Embedded within the vSphere kernel, Virtual SAN delivers an efficient data path for performance while minimizing resource utilization resulting in the consumption of less than 10% of CPU resources.
• Performance with elastic and linear scalability: Virtual SAN uses flash to deliver performance acceleration through R/W caching. The software provides a granular and elastic approach to provision performance and capacity enabling customers to linearly scale their clusters on demand by adding nodes to a cluster or disks to individual nodes
• Storage Policy Based Management: With storage policy based management, it SAN shifts the management model for storage from the device to the application. A single Virtual SAN datastore can provide differentiated service levels based on individual VM policies. For administrators, there are no complex configurations through LUNs or volumes, they avoid overprovisioning, and can change policies easily. With automated provisioning and management, administrators improve the ability to meet SLAs.
• Integration with the VMware stack: It is easy to configure and deploy requiring two clicks using vSphere Web Client. Its integration with vSphere enables customers to use data services such as backup, cloning, replication and snapshots as well as features such as Distributed Resource Scheduler, HA, vMotion and Storage vMotion. Additionally, Virtual SAN is interoperable with Horizon View 5.3.1, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite and VMware vCloud Automation Center.

A hardware independent solution, Virtual SAN can be deployed on a range of servers. Customers have two options for deploying Virtual SAN – Virtual SAN Ready Nodes (pre-validated configurations of servers), and a component-based hardware compatibility list that enables customers to pick and choose the components they prefer. More than 150 components and 13 Ready Nodes are certified with Virtual SAN.

Compatibility Guide for Virtual SAN

Helping Customers to Reduce TCO
Virtual SAN helps customers to reduce TCO through Capex and Opex savings. The software takes advantage of server side hardware economics by pooling internal magnetic disks and flash devices from industry-standard x86 servers. Customers avoid large upfront costs by starting small and adding disks or nodes to their Virtual SAN cluster as capacity or performance needs arise without disruption. Virtual SAN also helps customers to achieve Opex savings through automation that eliminates time-consuming manual processes as well as easing traditionally complex change management, storage configuration and capacity planning tasks.

Virtual SAN is available. Virtual SAN is priced at $2,495 per processor. Virtual SAN for Desktop is priced at $50 per user.

For a limited time, customers can purchase a bundle of Virtual SAN with vSphere Data Protection Advanced for $2,875 per processor. For a limited time, vSphere Storage Appliance customers will be able to upgrade to Virtual SAN at 20% off the list price.