Editorial note: This blog was originally published on January 15, 2025 and has been updated to reflect VCF 9.1 updates.
Are you planning on deploying or have you already stood up your VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud using VMware vSAN? If you have deployed or are thinking of deploying your VCF environment using vSAN, you will be able to leverage the power of software defined storage. A default deployment of VCF using vSAN begins the journey, but doesn’t configure many of the features and capabilities offered by the platform.
There are substantial cost savings, when you take advantage of all vSAN has to offer. According to Signal65, they found that utilizing vSAN results in a 30% cost savings over five years. They go into a full analysis in the Economics of Disaggregated Private Cloud Storage report.
If you are an experienced operator of vSAN perhaps your environment has been optimized appropriately. If not, you may not be maximizing the value of your VCF investment. Examples of vSAN features that can help you do this include:
Policy based storage is one of the most powerful features in the vSAN storage policy engine. vSAN uses these policies to define the storage characteristics that will be used for the virtual machine (VM). These policies are not static. They can be modified on the fly if VM requirements change.
By default, when configuring vSAN, both in VCF and in VMware vSphere Foundation, the default vSAN storage policy is used. A screenshot of the default storage policy is shown below.
What does this mean? Well, it means that there will be only a basic level of protection configured. In this default case the only setting configured is tolerance of a single failure. In the event of a single host failure, a secondary copy of the VM data is still available on the vSAN datastore and can be powered on. Typically, this is automatically performed using VMware High Availability (HA) when the failure is detected. This is a great policy for all workloads by default because it provides a good balance between space usage and protection.
Why is this important? This policy can be modified for all VMs, or you can create a new policy that specifies different settings such as, a higher level of availability, more disk stripes, or to limit IOPS, if appropriate. However, there is a trade-off between storage space utilization and the resultant costs, and the required level of protection from failures.
VCF Professional Services can analyze your environment and help to develop and configure a storage policy strategy that is tailored to meet the performance, protection, and security requirements of your workloads.
Another key topology choice when deploying vSAN is the use of stretch clusters for business continuity and disaster recovery. This feature is available as an option within vSAN but is not configured by default in VCF. Once a workload domain is deployed, there are workflows in VCF to add stretch clustering as a secondary availability zone. Logically, this looks like the following diagram.
vSAN Stretched Clusters allow for an additional level of availability. By incorporating multiple availability zones in the environment, it can help reduce the radius of a failure and can increase application availability. Typically, multiple availability zones are deployed across two independent data centers, but they could be in other configurations as well.
Although it does increase the hardware requirements, the cost for an entire site to be protected against a failure is very attractive compared to other more expensive methods of protection.
This is a good example of a vSAN feature that VCF Professional Services can help you set up. Our Professional Services teams have a wealth of experience for assessing environment requirements, designing, and implementing vSAN Stretch Clusters to meet a variety of business objectives.
If you are new to vSAN there is often a learning curve to know which resources to leverage and what to look for when diagnosing issues. This is not specific to vSAN, there’s always a learning curve when adding new capabilities to any datacenter. When it comes to the performance and capacity of vSAN we have a multitude of built in tools as well as dashboards from VMware Cloud Foundation Operations (formerly Aria Operations) that can provide a wealth of information. This helps to reduce the learning curve to be able to better manage vSAN in an environment.
For example, just by clicking on the vSAN cluster, you can see the health and capacity details all in one overview screen.
If you drill down further and click into vSAN Health, the exact details of what has been tested and the health state is displayed allowing you to troubleshoot further.
By selecting Capacity from the cluster, you can view a breakdown of capacity usage for each storage policy configured.
By selecting Capacity from the cluster, you can view a breakdown of capacity usage for each storage policy configured.
Similarly, by selecting Performance you are provided with a significant amount of information for the environment. This will allow you to get a breakdown of statistics and metrics for diagnosing performance issues for VMs, Hosts and disks. A good example is a VM that is powering on slowly. By examining the performance metrics, you could determine if there was contention on the storage or network, a disk failure, or even if there was a limit set on the virtual machine limiting resources.
While vSAN includes a wealth of tools for monitoring and managing the environment, VMware Cloud Foundation Operations can take your monitoring and management capabilities to a whole new level. VCF Operations is configured by default when standing up VCF.
With VCF Operations, a number of built in dashboards for both VCF and vSAN are available. If there are specific needs, custom dashboards can be built to showcase exactly the data which is required by the business. With deeper insights and tools your administrators can ensure your VMs are meeting SLAs with high throughput and low latency. You can even get predictive growth metrics to understand trends and plan for future needs.
VCF Professional Services can help by assessing your environment requirements, deploying, and configuring VCF Operations dashboards to meet your business and technical needs.
vSAN is a powerful addition to any datacenter. This blog explored only a few vSAN features that happen to be my personal favorites and is not intended to be an exhaustive list of how it can benefit your organization. By modernizing your environment to take advantage of the beneficial features vSAN offers you can tune your virtual storage to provide consistent performance at scale, avoid downtime with high resilience, and adapt to changing requirements.
vSAN is also not only for new hardware deployments, it can be added to existing ESX Clusters by adding disks to the hosts. This is an attractive option for customers who are looking to extend the lifecycle of hardware and reduce operational costs. For additional details and a repurposing checklist read TAM Brandon Hahn’s blog.
VCF Professional Services for vSAN can help you modernize your private cloud with vSAN virtualized storage and gain operational insights with dashboards powered by VCF Operations so that you can take advantage of these capabilities and more.
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理，仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。