VMware Virtual San: New Virtualization Technology

VMware Virtual San (VSAN) Technology

VMware Virtual San is new networked oriented virtualization storage announced on March 6th, 2013 and services are available march 10th onwards. Virtual San is a hypervisor-converged storage system which has featured performance optimized with virtual environments with high efficiency and low cost. The VMware vSphere platform has seamless integration with virtual san enables the easy usage and also helps to automate manual storage tasks.

 Available design features of virtual scan are 3 to 32 node cluster support, 3200 virtual machine support, two million IOPS performance and 4.4 Petabytes of storage capacity. There are more nodes, different flash support and more features release soon.

VMware Virtual San Key Features

• Simple, hypervisor-converged storage technology
• High performance
• Low cost virtual storage
• Server acceleration for easy storage
• Built-in failure tolerance
• Independent to hardware
• Interoperability with VMware products, click here to see more features

Virtual San Depth Features

VMware VSAN uses hypervisor converged storage technology, seamless integration with vSphere enables the better performance. What is VMware hypervisor? Hypervisor is a virtual machine monitor tool like hardware, or software, provide platform to create and run virtual machines. It also optimizes the I/O data path and delivers cool performance than external devices or virtual appliance.

 

The VM-centric policy based management (SPBM) and automation is cool features VSAN technology, which provides statements of storage requirements each and every virtual machines or disks. In virtual San these storage requirement polices are governed by SLAs. SPBM allows creating storage policies based on their capacity needs, availability and virtual machine performance.

Using SSD flash server technology enables the virtual san to accelerates speed in storage and minimizes or avoids (most of the cases) storage latency. It controls the read cache and write buffer. Read cache is list keeper of commonly accessed disk blocks and write buffer speed ups the write operations. Thereby virtual san minimizes the storage latency.

Another cool feature of VMware Virtual san is that interoperability with VMware stack. The virtual machine can access VMware products and resources with ease. The interoperability of virtual san enables the availability and extending the storage functionality. It also interoperates with VMware site recovery manager, cloud automation center, simple resource management and VMware view. VMware view provides very simple and fast storage virtual desktop machines.

The built-in failure tolerance feature prevents the virtual disks or virtual machine from different failures such as disk, host or network. SPBM helps to avoid failures by setting storage policy like how many host, disk or network failures tolerable in a virtual san cluster. Virtual San technology is also hardware independent agnostic solution which provides more flexibility. It allows to run different hardware with different operating system and configuration.

Resources:
V3.co.uk