What is vSAN in simple terms?

A virtual storage area network (VSAN) is a logical partition in a physical storage area network (SAN). VSANs enable traffic to be isolated within specific portions of a storage area network, so if a problem occurs in one logical partition, it can be handled with a minimum of disruption to the rest of the network.

What is the benefit of vSAN?

The touted benefits of VSAN include: Performance, since the local server can access data at full speed and low latency. Lower infrastructure cost, since there are no networked storage appliances. High scalability — simply put, add more servers and get more storage.

What is the difference between SAN and vSAN?

Differences Between SAN and vSAN vSAN only work with ESXi hosts, while SAN leverages storage protocols such as FCP and iSCSI. With a traditional SAN, storage administrators are required to pre-allocate storage on different systems, while vSAN automatically converts local storage resources into a single storage pool.

Is vSAN a block storage?

vSAN does not behave like traditional storage volumes based on LUNs or NFS shares. The iSCSI target service uses LUNs to enable an initiator on a remote host to transport block-level data to a storage device in the vSAN cluster. Some standard storage protocols, such as FCP, do not apply to vSAN.

Is vSAN a protocol?

As vSAN only communicates with vSphere virtual machines, there’s really no need for a standard storage protocol. vSAN uses a proprietary protocol within the cluster that’s more efficient than the familiar choices.

How do you use vSAN?

Procedure

1. Right-click a data center and select New Cluster.
2. Type a name for the cluster in the Name text box.
3. Turn on DRS, vSphere HA, and vSAN for the cluster.
4. Click OK. The cluster appears in the inventory.
5. Add hosts to the vSAN cluster. vSAN clusters can include hosts with or without capacity devices.

Does vSAN need vCenter?

vSAN & vCenter are totally independent of each other and vSAN will continue to run even without vCenter. Assuming you had a vSAN cluster all setup and configured today, running production workload. Someone then accidentally powered off the vCenter server, technically, nothing is going to happen to the vSAN environment.

Is vSAN free?

With VSAN Free, you can deploy a 2-node cluster to present a highly available storage solution to hypervisor such as Hyper-V or ESXi for free. Thanks to this free version, we are able to deploy a highly available storage solution.

What is NAS and SAN?

What’s the Diff: NAS vs. SAN. NAS is a single storage device that serves files over Ethernet and is relatively inexpensive and easy to set up, while a SAN is a tightly coupled network of multiple devices that is more expensive and complex to set up and manage.

Is vSAN any good?

VMware vSAN is one of our storage tools and we use it for tier 2 storage. It is great in the scalability but not that great for high performance. It is a great alternative for a homogenous environment with no high IOPS utilisation. Sadly, it’s too expensive.