vSAN is a policy-driven software-defined storage solution that is integrated with vSphere. vSAN simplifies storage provisioning and management in the software-defined enterprise.

References

Title	Location
VMware vSphere Documentation	https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere
VMware vSAN Documentation	https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSAN
VMware vSAN Plan and Design Guide	https://core.vmware.com/vsan-plan-and-design
vSAN Reference Architectures	https://core.vmware.com/reference-architectures
VMware vSAN Operations and Management	https://core.vmware.com/vsan-operations-and-management
Monitoring the VMware vSAN Cluster	https://core.vmware.com/resource/vsan-operations-guide
Troubleshooting vSAN Performance	https://core.vmware.com/resource/troubleshooting-vsan-performance

vSAN Introduction

• Describe vSAN
  • vSAN is an enterprise storage solution with full vSphere integration. vSAN includes a distributed layer of software within the ESXi hypervisor and can perform the following functions:
  • Aggregate local storage together into a single cluster-wide shared datastore
  • Utilize networking for host communications
  • Enhance server hardware resource utilization
  • Reduce data center requirements for power and cooling
  • Storage Device Support:
  • Operational Benefits:
    • Maximizes use of existing server infrastructure.
    • Eliminates need for separate SAN hardware.
    • Results in lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
  • Licensing:
    • Activating vSAN provides a 60-day trial license with full feature access.
  • Networking Importance:
• vSAN provides four types of deployment architectures to meet enterprise needs.
  • vSAN Cluster Types
    • Single Site vSAN Cluster: One site 3 to 64 hosts
    • Two-Node Cluster: 2 hosts at remote site, 1 witness at alternative site
    • vSAN Stretched Cluster: Up to 20 hosts at each Site; 1 Witness at a Third Site
    • Cross-Cluster Capacity Sharing: vSAN Clusters Accessing Other vSAN Clusters
• vSAN Datastore:
  • Single cluster-wide datastore
  • Easily scalable by adding more storage devices/hosts
  • Managed through vCenter
  • Storage policies determine the data storage method
  • Appears like any other supported datastore
• vSAN Data Storage
  • vSAN is an object-based storage solution when compared to block-based storage solutions such as VMFS or file-based storage solutions like NFS.
• Available vSAN Storage Architectures
  • vSAN 8 supports two types of storage architectures
    • Original Storage Architecture (OSA) – diskgroups configuration
      • max. of 5 diskgroups per node
      • 1 cache device in each diskgroup
      • up to 7 capacity devices (ssd or HDD)
      • vSAN All-Flash dg requires at least 10Gbps network bandwidth
        • Reads from capacity tier and cache is a100% allocated for writes
      • Hybrid Disk Group:
        • SSD used for caching and HDD for capacity
        • cache tier: 70% for reads and 30% for writes
        • capacity tier:
          • read hit – read from cache
          • hit missed – copy from capacity tier to cache tier and then return
    • Express Storage Architecture (ESA). – (introduce in vsphere 8.0.x)
      • single-tier called storage pool
      • uses NVMe-based flash devices.
      • no cache but performance component is enabled
• vSAN storage Policies
  • define how data is placed on disk
  • A single policy can be applied to a group of VMs, a single VM, or a single VMDK
  • Supported Policies:
  • No Data Redundancy (RAID-O)
  • Mirroring (RAID-1)
  • Erasure Coding (RAID-5/6)
    
• Review different types of vSAN architectures
• Explore vSAN implementation types
• Distinguish different vSAN disk configurations
• Examine vSAN Storage Policies

Planning a vSAN Cluster

Deploying a vSAN Cluster

vSAN Storage Policies

vSAN Resilience and Data Availability

vSAN Storage Space Efficiency

vSAN Security Operations

vSAN Stretched and Two-Node Clusters

vSAN Cross-Cluster Capacity Sharing

vSAN File Service and iSCSI Target Service

vSAN Cluster Maintenance

vSAN Cluster Monitoring