VMware officially released its first software-defined storage product.
VMware Virtual SAN, which is built directly into the VMware vSphere kernel, 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 virtual machines (VMs).
“Today VMware changes the way that storage has been operated to date,” said John Gilmartin, vice president and general manager, SDDC Suite Business Unit, VMware. “VMware Virtual SAN is a radically simple storage solution optimized for virtual environments that brings an application-centric approach to storage management. Customers that know VMware vSphere know VMware Virtual SAN, and can rely on that familiarity to hit the ground running with VMware Virtual SAN.”
Features include:
- Hypervisor-converged architecture: Embedded within the VMware vSphere kernel, VMware Virtual SAN delivers the most efficient data path for superior performance while minimizing resource utilization resulting in the consumption of less than 10 percent of CPU resources.
- High performance with elastic and linear scalability: VMware Virtual SAN uses flash to deliver performance acceleration through read/write 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, VMware Virtual SAN shifts the management model for storage from the device to the application. A single VMware 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 Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
- Integration with the VMware stack: VMware Virtual SAN is easy to configure and deploy requiring two clicks using VMware vSphere Web Client. Its integration with VMware vSphere enables customers to use data services such as backup, cloning, replication and snapshots as well as features such as Distributed Resource Scheduler™, High Availability, vMotion and Storage vMotion. Additionally, VMware Virtual SAN is interoperable with VMware Horizon View 5.3.1, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite and VMware vCloud Automation Center.
Some performance specs:
- 2 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) on a read-only workload on a 32 node cluster; (1) and,
- 640,000 IOPS on a mixed workload on a 32 node cluster.
VMware Virtual SAN can be deployed on a wide range of servers. Pricing starts at $2,495 per processor. VMware Virtual SAN for Desktop is priced at $50 per user.