31 May 2016
By Yendis Lambert

VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 Deduplication, Compression, and Erasure Coding

VMware, ,
Hyper-Converged solutions featuring all-flash storage are the future as they continue to decrease in cost and offer dramatically better performance when compared to magnetic disks. Virtual SAN is optimized for modern all-flash storage with efficient near-line deduplication, compression, and erasure coding capabilities that lower TCO. Deduplication and compression enable considerable capacity savings across the entire Virtual SAN cluster — especially in environments where standard OS builds (templates and clones) are used and where there is abundant data commonality such as file shares. RAID-5/6 erasure coding reduces capacity consumption by as much as 50% versus RAID-1 (mirroring) with the same levels of availability for FTT=1 and FTT=2 Virtual SAN…
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16 Dec 2015
By Yendis Lambert

Oracle Real Application Clusters on VMware Virtual SAN

VMware, ,
This solution addresses the common business challenges discussed in the previous section that CIOs face today in an online transaction processing (OLTP) environment that requires availability, reliability, scalability, predictability and cost-effective storage, which helps customers design and implement optimal configurations specifically for Oracle RAC Database on Virtual SAN. Key Results The following highlights validate that Virtual SAN is an enterprise-class storage solution suitable for Oracle RAC Database: Predictable and highly available Oracle RAC OLTP performance on Virtual SAN Simple design methodology that eliminates operational and maintenance complexity of traditional SAN Sustainable solution for enterprise Tier-1 Database Management System (DBMS) application…
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15 Nov 2015
By Yendis Lambert

VMware Virtual SAN 6.1 Stretched Cluster Bandwidth Sizing Guidance

VMware
The purpose of this document is to explain how to size bandwidth requirements for Virtual SAN in Stretched Cluster configurations. This document only covers the Virtual SAN network bandwidth requirements. In Stretched Cluster configurations, two data fault domains have one or more hosts, and the third fault domain contains a witness host or witness appliance. In this document each data fault domain will be referred to as a site.Virtual SAN Stretched Cluster configurations can be spread across distances, provided bandwidth and latency requirements are met. The bandwidth requirement between the main sites is highly dependant on the workload to be run…
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04 Feb 2015
By Yendis

What’s New: VMware Virtual SAN 6.0

VMware,
The new VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 is a second-generation hypervisor-converged enterprise-class storage solution for vSphere-virtualized infrastructures that combines the compute and storage resources of vSphere hosts. With it’s two supported architectures hybrid and all-flash, Virtual SAN 6.0 is able to satisfy the demands of all virtualized applications, including business-critical applications. Virtual SAN 6.0 is a VMware-designed storage solution that makes software-defined storage a reality for VMware customers that delivers radically simple, hypervisor-converged storage for virtual machines. Download the White Paper  
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08 Jan 2015
By Yendis

Microsoft Exchange Server Performance on VMware Virtual SAN

VMware, ,
Microsoft Exchange Server is a commonly found email server and is considered a business-critical application by many organizations. Virtualized instances of Exchange Server can be successfully deployed using VMware vSphere 5.5 and it has been shown that Exchange Server performs well in a virtualized environment with shared SAN storage. With the release of VMware Virtual SAN, the next logical step is to study the performance of Exchange Server on this storage platform. This white paper shows that virtualized Exchange Server 2010 on vSphere 5.5 with VMware Virtual SAN scales well while maintaining very good application response time as more Exchange…
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02 Sep 2014
By Yendis

VMware Virtual SAN Sizing Tool

VMware,
All Virtual SAN customers and enthusiasts can easy get sizing ideas and estimations on the amount hardware resources necessary to support a particular Virtual SAN design. All you will need  to do is provide a few virtual machine inputs based on capacity, performance, and availability requirements. The purpose of this tool is to help determine the hardware specifications for hosts in a Virtual SAN cluster required to run a set of virtual machines defined by a set of input characteristics. These important assumptions should be understood before using this tool: All hosts in the cluster are assumed to have an…
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01 Sep 2014
By Yendis

VMware Virtual SAN best practices

VMware
Cormac Hogan (VMware Storage Architect) presented at VMworld 2014 some common mistakes/pitfalls in VMware Virtual SAN design. Below are some great pointers. Minimal cluster size is 4 nodes. According to the requirements you can build a Virtual SAN using a 3 node cluster but you should take into account failure or maintenance of 1 node. Upgrading vSphere 5 to vSphere 5.5 Update 1 introduces a known bug. Install the fix mentioned in this VMware KB article. Use enterprise grade SSD. Selecting the SSD with the right performance profile can make a huge difference in VSAN performance easily. Both SSD and PCIe flash…
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