One of the products I strongly believe in and truly love is Virtual SAN aka VSAN. I have written a whole bunch of articles on this topic so far and I figured I would list all of them on a single page. I also wanted to list some of the articles by other folks out there which you might find interesting.
I completely overhauled the page as the link lists were getting too long. I have 2 sections: Blogs and Official Collateral. I have only listed those which I find interesting for whatever reason. The first link is the last article added. I added the name of the author behind it to make it clear who wrote it:
Official Collateral
- Virtual SAN 6.2 and Horizon Reference Architecture
- Virtual SAN 6.2 Performance with Online Transaction Processing workloads
- Virtual SAN 6.2 Networking Design Guide
- Virtual SAN 6.2 Design and Sizing Guide
- Virtual SAN 6.2 Stretched Cluster and 2-Node Guide
- Virtual SAN Deployments Over L2/L3 Networks
- Virtual SAN 6.2 Space Efficiency Technologies White Paper
- VSAN 6.2 in a PCI DSS environment
- VMware VSAN 6.2 licensing guide
- What is new for Virtual SAN 6.2 White Paper
- Solutions overview: VSAN for Security Zones
- Virtual SAN Licensing Paper
- Solution overview: Remote office Branch Office deployments
- Solution overview: Hyper-converged infrastructure for management clusters!
- Oracle RAC on Virtual SAN
- Virtual SAN Stretched Clustering Bandwidth Sizing
- An overview of VMware Virtual SAN caching algorithms
- Virtual SAN Stretched Clustering Performance Best Practices
- VSAN 6.0 Troubleshooting Guide
- VSAN 6.0 RVC reference for Virtual SAN
- VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 Performance: Scalability and Best Practices
- vsanSparse – Tech Note for Virtual SAN 6.0 Snapshots
- Microsoft applications on Virtual SAN 6.0
- Reference Architecture: VMware Horizon View 6.0.2 and VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 Hybrid
- VSAN 6.0 Proof of Concept Guide
- Reference Architecture: VMware Horizon View and VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 All-Flash!
Blogs:
- VSAN everywhere with Computacenter (Duncan Epping)
- Docker Volume Driver for vSphere on Virtual SAN (Cormac Hogan)
- Can all VSAN Witness VMs for ROBO be in the same VLAN? (Duncan Epping)
- 600GB write buffer limit for VSAN? (Duncan Epping)
- How HA handles a VSAN Stretched Cluster Site Partition (Duncan Epping)
- Recovering from a full VSAN datastore scenario (Cormac Hogan)
- Can I still provision VMs when a VSAN Stretched Cluster site has failed? (Duncan Epping)
- A primer on App Volumes and AppStacks on VSAN (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN Success Story: Zettagrid and VSAN the perfect match for a reliable cloud infrastructure (Duncan Epping)
- Horizon View 7 on VSAN – Policies Revisited (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN 6.2, checksumming where you should (Duncan Epping)
- VSAN Health checks disabled after upgrade to vCenter 6.0 U2 (Duncan Epping)
- Component Metadata Health – Locating Problematic Disk (Cormac Hogan)
- Hybrid vs All-flash VSAN, are we really getting close? (Duncan Epping)
- VSAN 6.2 : Why going forward FTT=2 should be your new default (Duncan Epping)
- Getting started with the new VSAN 6.2 Management API (William Lam)
- Want to hear all about VSAN 6.2? Watch the #SFD9 recordings! (Duncan Epping)
- Migrating from Hybrid to All-Flash VSAN (Duncan Epping)
- VSAN 6.2 Part 10 – Problematic Disk Handling (Cormac Hogan)
- VMware Virtual SAN: The Technology And Its Future (Christos Karamanolis)
- VSAN 6.2 (vSphere 6.0 Update 2) homelab on 6th Gen Intel NUC (WIlliam Lam)
- VSAN 6.2 : Sparse Swap, what is it good for? (Duncan Epping)
- Check your VSAN disk controllers against the HCL with PowerCLI (Duncan Epping)
- VSAN 6.2 Part 9 – Replacing the witness appliance (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN 6.2 Part 8 – Upgrading VSAN Stretched Cluster from 6.1 to 6.2 (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN 6.2 Part 7 – Capacity Views (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN 6.2 Part 6 – Performance Service (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN 6.2 Part 5 – New Sparse VM Swap Object (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN 6.2 Part 4 – IOPS limit for object (Cormac Hogan)
- SAP support for VSAN, VSAN support for SAP (Erik Rieger)
- VSAN 6.2 Part 3 – Software Checksum (Cormac Hogan)
- The 10% rule for VSAN caching, calculate it on a VM basis not disk capacity! (Duncan Epping)
- VSAN 6.2 Part 2 – RAID-5 and RAID-6 configurations (Cormac Hogan)
- The use of Erasure Coding in VSAN 6.2 (Christos Karamanolis)
- VSAN 6.2 Part 1 – Deduplication and Compression (Cormac Hogan)
- What’s new for VSAN 6.2 (Duncan Epping)
- VSAN 6.2 Overview (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN Stretched Cluster – some possible warnings (Cormac Hogan)
- Disable VSAN site locality in low latency stretched cluster (Duncan Epping)
- Jumbo Frames and VSAN Stretched Cluster configurations (Duncan Epping)
- Removing stretched VSAN configuration? (Duncan Epping)
- VSAN enabling Sky to be fast / responsive / agile… (Duncan Epping)
- VSAN.ClomMaxComponentSizeGB explained (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN resync behaviour when failed component recovers (Cormac Hogan)
- Virtual SAN: Generic storage platform of the future (Duncan Epping)
- Virtual SAN Licensing/Packaging (Duncan Epping)
- Common VSAN health check issues and resolutions (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN Proactive Rebalance not starting (Cormac Hogan)
- 2 is the minimum number of hosts for VSAN if you ask me (Duncan Epping)
- Read locality in VSAN stretched cluster (Cormac Hogan)
- Override default VSAN Maintenance (decommission) Mode in VSAN 6.1 (William Lam)
- VSAN 6.1 New Feature – Problematic Disk Handling (Cormac Hogan)
- SMP-FT support for Virtual SAN ROBO configurations (Duncan Epping)
- Step-by-step deployment of the VSAN witness appliance (Cormac Hogan)
- A closer look at the VSAN witness appliance (Cormac Hogan)
- Virtual SAN beta coming up with dedupe and erasure coding! (Duncan Epping)
- How to deploy and run the VSAN 6.1 Witness Virtual Appliance on VMware Fusion & Workstation? (William Lam)
- Supported network topologies for VSAN stretched cluster (Cormac Hogan)
- Virtual SAN enabling PeaSoup to simplify cloud (Duncan Epping)
- Virtual SAN is breaking down silos for United Utilities (Duncan Epping)
- Handling VSAN trace files when ESXi boots from a flash device (Cormac Hogan)
- Updated VSAN 6.0 Nested ESXi OVF Templates for 64 Nodes, All-Flash Array & Fault Domain Testing (William Lam)
- Home Labs made easier with VSAN 6.0 + USB Disks (William Lam)
- How to configure an All-Flash VSAN 6.0 Configuration using Nested ESXi? (William)
- vROps Management Pack for Storage Devices 6.0.2 is GA (Cormac Hogan)
- Announcing Virtual SAN Health Check Plugin 6.0 Patch 1 (Cormac Hogan)
- Heads Up! Horizon View 6.1 and AF-VSAN Policies (Cormac Hogan)
- Why is my VSAN Component maximum showing less than 3000? (William Lam)
- VSAN 6.0 Part 1 – New quorum mechanism (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN 6.0 Part 2 – v2 On-disk Format Upgrade Considerations (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN 6.0 Part 3 – New Default Datastore Policy (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN 6.0 Part 4 – All-Flash VSAN Capacity Tier Considerations (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN 6.0 Part 5 – new vsanSparse snapshots (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN 6.0 Part 6 – Maintenance Mode Changes (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN 6.0 Part 7 – Blinking those blinking disk LEDs (C0rmac Hogan)
- VSAN 6.0 Part 8 – Fault Domains (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN 6.0 Part 9 – Proactive Re-balance (Cormac Hogan)
- VSAN 6.0 Part 10 – 10% cache recommendation for AF-VSAN (Cormac Hogan)
- One versus multiple VSAN diskgroups per host (Duncan Epping)
- Why Queue Depth matters! (Duncan Epping)
- Virtual SAN Read IO – cache / buffer / spindles (Duncan Epping)
- How to move a VSAN Cluster from one vCenter to another (William Lam)
- VSAN and OEM ESXi ISO images (Cormac Hogan)
- Disk Controller features and Queue Depth? (Duncan Epping)
- How VSAN handles a disk or host failure (Duncan Epping)
- Isolation / Partition scenario with VSAN cluster, how is this handled? (Duncan Epping)
- How to quickly setup and test VSAN using Nested ESXi (William Lam)
- How to bootstrap vCenter Server onto a single VSAN node Part 1? (William Lam)
- How to bootstrap vCenter Server onto a single VSAN node Part 2? (William Lam)
- How to run Nested ESXi on top of a VSAN datastore? (William Lam)
- VSAN performance: many SAS low capacity VS some SATA high capacity? (Duncan Epping)
- Restoring VSAN VM Storage Policies without vCenter part 1 (William Lam)
- Restoring VSAN VM Storage Policies without vCenter Part 2: Using vSphere API (William Lam)
- Exploring VSAN APIs Part 1 – Enable VSAN Cluster (William Lam)
- Exploring VSAN APIs Part 2 – Query available SSDs (William Lam)
- Exploring VSAN APIs Part 3 – Enable VSAN Traffic Type (William Lam)
- Exploring VSAN APIs Part 4 – VSAN Disk Mappings (William Lam)
- Exploring VSAN APIs Part 5 – VSAN Host Status (William Lam)
- Exploring VSAN APIs Part 6 – Modifying Virtual Machine VM Storage Policy (William Lam)
- Exploring VSAN APIs Part 7 – VSAN Datastore Folder Management (William Lam)
- Exploring VSAN APIs Part 8 – Maintenance Mode (William Lam)
- Exploring VSAN APIs Part 9 – VSAN Component count (William Lam)
- VSAN and Network IO Control / VDS part 2 (Duncan Epping)
- Virtual SAN and Network IO Control (Duncan Epping)
- Stripe segments and write acknowledgements (pretty pictures friday) (Duncan Epping)
- Virtual SAN and Data Locality/Gravity (Duncan Epping)
- Frequently asked questions about Virtual SAN / VSAN (Duncan Epping)
- VMware vSphere Virtual SAN design considerations (Duncan Epping)
- Introduction to VMware vSphere Virtual SAN (Duncan Epping)
- VMware Virtual SAN Review: Sysbench OLTP Performance (StorageReview.com)
- VMware Virtual SAN VMMark Results! (StorageReview.com)
- VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 Review: Overview and Configuration (StorageReview.com)
- VMware Virtual SAN Review: SQL Server Performance (StorageReview.com)
- VMware Virtual SAN Review: Scaled Sysbench OLTP Performance (StorageReview.com)
- VMware Virtual SAN Review: HCIbench Synthetic Performance (StorageReview.com)