I’ve been following the posts from the Register on VSAN and was surprised when they posted the cost of the hosts they configured: 30K each. With 3 at a minimum they concluded that for 90K you could buy yourself a nice legacy storage system. I don’t disagree with that to be honest… for 90K you can buy a nice legacy storage system. I guess you need to ask yourself first though what you will do with that 90K storage system by itself? Not much indeed, as you would need compute resources sitting next to it in order to do anything. So if you want to make a comparison, do not compare a full VSAN environment (or any other hyper-converged solution out there) to just a storage system at it just doesn’t make sense.
Now that still doesn’t make these hosts cheap I can hear you think, and again I agree with that. Although I have absolutely no clue where the 30K came from, and judging by the tweets this morning most people don’t know and feel it probably was overkill. Call me crazy, but I can configure a fully supported VSAN configuration for about 2250 USD (just HW) on the Dell website.
- Dell T320
- Intel Xeon E5-2420 1.90GHz 6 Core
- Perc H310 Disk Controller
- 32GB Memory
- 1 x 7200RPM 1TB NL-SAS
- 1 x 100GB Intel S3700 SSD (or dell equal drive)
- 5 x 1GbE NIC Port
I would like to conclude that VSAN would be a lot cheaper than those legacy solutions, less than 7500 USD for 3 hosts is peanuts right?!? Yes I know, the above configuration wouldn’t fit many use cases (except for maybe a ROBO deployment where only a couple of VMs are needed) and that was the whole point of the exercise showing how pointless these exercises can be. You can twist these numbers anyway you like, and you can configure your VSAN hosts any way you like as long as the components (HDD/SSD/Controller) are on the VSAN HCL and the system is on the vSphere HCL. PS: Dear Register, next time you run through the exercise, you may want to post the configuration you selected… It makes things a bit clearer.