Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

hypervisor-converged

Extending your vSphere platform with Virtual SAN

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Over the last couple of months I’ve spoken to many customers about Virtual SAN. What struck me during these conversations is how these customers spoke about Virtual SAN. In all cases when we start the conversation it starts with a conversation about what their environment used to looked like. What kind of storage they had. How it was configured, number of disks etc you name it. Of course we would discuss what kind of challenges they had with their legacy environment. Thinking back to these conversations there is one thing that really stood out, although never explicitly mentioned, the big difference between Virtual SAN and traditional storage systems is that Virtual SAN is not a storage system but rather an extension of the VMware vSphere Platform.

Source: Wiki
Software extension, a file containing programming that serves to extend the capabilities of or data available to a more basic program

I believe this statement is spot on. What is great about Virtual SAN is that it does the extension of the capabilities of vSphere in an extremely easy way. Virtual SAN achieves this simply by abstracting layers of complexity and pooling the resources and allow these to be assigned to workloads in an automated fashion whether through the use of policies and a simple UI or through the vSphere APIs. Keywords here are definitely: abstract, pool and automate.

Maybe I should have used the word “converging” instead of “abstracting”. That is essentially what is happening, and although many other vendors claim the same, I truly believe that Virtual SAN is one of the few solutions which is truly hyper-converged as it seamlessly converges layers instead of adding a layer on top of another layer. Hyper-convergence is more than just stacking layers in a single box.

With Virtual SAN storage is just there. Not bolted on, layered on top or mounted to the side, an integral part of your environment, an extension of your platform. Virtual SAN does for storage what vSphere does for CPU and Memory, it becomes a fundamental component of your cluster.

Building a hyper-converged platform using VMware technology part 3

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Considering some of the pricing details have been announced I figured I would write a part 3 of my “Building a hyper-converged platform using VMware technology” series (part 1 and part 2) Before everyone starts jumping in on the pricing details, I want to make sure people understand that I have absolutely no responsibilities whatsoever related to this subject, I am just the messenger in this case. In order to run through this exercise I figured I would take a popular SuperMicro configuration and ensure that the components used are certified by VMware.

I used the thinkmate website to get pricing details on the SuperMicro kit. Lets list the hardware first:

    • 4 hosts each with:
      -> Dual Six-Core Intel Xeon® CPU E5-2620 v2 2.10GHz 15MB Cache (80W)
      -> 128 GB (16GB PC3-14900 1866MHz DDR3 ECC Registered DIMM)
      -> 800GB Intel DC S3700 Series 2.5″ SATA 6.0Gb/s SSD (MLC)
      -> 5 x 1.0TB SAS 2.0 6.0Gb/s 7200RPM – 2.5″ – Seagate Constellation.2
      -> Intel 10-Gigabit Ethernet CNA X540-T2 (2x RJ-45)

The hardware is around $ 30081,-, this is without any discount. Just the online store price. Now the question is, what about Virtual SAN? You would need to license 8 sockets with Virtual SAN in this scenario, again this is the online store price without any discount:

  • $ 2495,- per socket = $ 19960,-

This makes the cost of the SuperMicro hardware including the Virtual SAN licenses for four nodes in this configuration roughly $ 50.041. (There is also the option to license Virtual SAN for View per user which is $ 50,-.) That is around $ 12600 per host including the VSAN licenses.

If you do not own vSphere licenses yet you will need to license vSphere itself as well, I would recommend Enterprise ( $ 2875,- per socket) as with VSAN you will automatically get Storage Policy Based Management and the Distributed Switch. Potentially, depending on your deployment type, you will also need vCenter Server. Standard license for vCenter Server is $ 4995,-. If you would include all VMware licenses the total combined would be: $ 78036,-. That is around 19600 per host including the VSAN and vSphere licenses. Not bad if you ask me,

I want to point out that I did not include Support and Maintenance costs. As this will depend on which type of support you require and what type of vSphere licenses you will have I felt there were too many variable to make a comparison. It should also be noted that many storage solutions come with very limited first year support… Before you do a comparison, make sure to look at what is included and what will need to be bought separately for proper support.

** disclaimer: Please run through these numbers yourself, and validate the HCL before purchasing any equipment. I cannot be held responsible for any pricing / quoting errors, hardware prices can vary from day to day and this is exercise was for educational purposes only! **

What is Virtual SAN really about?

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When talking about Virtual SAN you hear a lot of people talking about the benefits, what Virtual SAN is essentially about. You see the same with various other so-called Software Defined Storage solutions. People typically, when talking about these solutions, talk about things like “enabling within 2 clicks”… Or maybe about how easy it is to scale out, or scale-up for that matter. How much performance you have because of the way they use flash drives. Or about some of the advanced data services they offer.

While all of these are important, when it comes to Virtual SAN I don’t think that is the true strength. Sure, it is great to be able to provide a well performing easy to install scale-out storage solution… but the true strength in my opinion is: Policy Based Management & Integration. After having worked with VSAN for months, that is probably what stood out the most… policy based management

What does this deep integration and what do these policies allow you to do?

  • It provides the ability to specify both Performance and Availability characteristics using the UI (Web Client) or through the API.
    • Number of replicas
    • Stripe width
    • Cache reservations
    • Space reservations
  • It allows you to apply policies to your workload in an easy way through the UI (or API).
  • It provides the ability to do this in a granular way, per VMDK and not per datastore.
  • To a group of VMs or even all VMs in a programmatic way when needed.

Over the last couple of months I have played extensively with this feature of VSAN and vCenter, and in my opinion it is by far the biggest benefit of a hypervisor-converged storage solution. Deep integration with the platform, exposed in a simplistic VM-centric way through the Web Client and/or the vSphere APIs.