Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

pricing

vSAN licensing / packaging

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I’ve seen many questions on vSAN packaging over the last months so I figured I would share a table that shows what is possible with which license. A lot of the confusion is around the “ROBO” use case, and I want to make it crystal clear that you can deploy a 2-node ROBO configuration using Standard, Advanced or the special “vSAN for ROBO” 25VM pack that will be made available. Anyway, when it comes to functionality the table below should make it crystal clear what is included with what.

Before anyone asks, “stretched clusters” refers to the vSAN stretched cluster workflow / feature. Two data center rooms in the same building leveraging external witness capabilities through the stretched cluster workflow requires “Advanced”. Three datacenters stretched across campus distance using “fault domains” does not require Advanced, but can use Standard.

Also note that “vSAN Advanced” is included in the “Horizon Advanced” and the “Horizon Enterprise” Suites. If you have either of those, I highly recommend testing vSAN, I am seeing more and more customers taking advantage of it, a great storage platform which performs extremely and is really simple to manage is included in your suite, why not use it?!

The below table shows what the current licensing/packaging looks like for vSAN 6.6. Note that for vSAN 6.5 “all-flash” is now available in all licensing levels. In vSAN 6.6 “QoS” has been dropped down to Standard, and “Local Site Protection for Stretched Clusters” and “vSAN Encryption” have been added to Enterprise. For pricing, please contact your partner or a VMware sales rep.

vSAN
Standard		vSAN
Advanced		vSAN EnterprisevSAN for ROBO StandardvSAN for ROBO Advanced
SPBMXXXXX
Read/Write SSD CachingXXXXX
Distributed RAIDXXXXX
Distributed SwitchXXXXX
Snapshots / ClonesXXXXX
Rack AwarenessXXXXX
Health MonitoringXXXXX
vSphere Replication *XXXXX
Two Node Robo ConfigurationXXXXX
Two Node Direct ConnectXXXXX
All-FlashXXXXX
Quality of ServiceXXXXX
Dedupe and CompressionXXX
RAID-5/6XXX
Stretched ClusterX
Local Site Protection for Stretched ClustersX
vSAN EncryptionX

* vSphere Replication is new with a 5 minute RPO, this was exclusive certified for vSAN. In some material you will see this being referred too as vSAN Replication.

Full licensing white paper can be found here,

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! **