VSAN is hot. It's time to check my vSphere 5.5 page and see all the new features of vSphere 5.5 that have been unveiled during VMworld 2013. I have been playing with VMware VSAN (one of the pre-release builds) and in one of my earlier articles you could read about the VSAN configuration steps, but before you should read my post VMware VSAN introduced in vSphere 5.5 – How it works and what’s the requirements?. I thought that it could be a good idea that I record a video to show how it looks like. So here is a VMware VSAN Video -:).
VMware VSAN is should be available shortly, you can register through www.vsanbeta.com to take part of the public beta when available.
But before we see the video, I'd like to point out some good posts on VSAN so far. Unfortunately, VSAN is not publicly available yet and I'm, like some others, using the beta built.
David Hill from VMware shows on his post the configuration limits of VSAN (see the left table). Those numbers should evolve as the product will first be in public beta and GA in 2014. More detailed post from Duncan shows more concerning the networking. This took my attention, as he says that:
It is recommended to have a VSAN VMkernel on every physical NIC! Ensure to configure them in a “active/standby” configuration so that when you have 2 physical NIC ports and 2 VSAN VMkernel’s each of them will have its own port. Do note that multiple VSAN VMkernel NICs on a single host on the same subnet is not a supported configuration, in different subnets it is supported
It means that for each physical adapter on the host we need to create VMkernel port and activate the VSAN traffic on it, to get more throughput. Cool.
As far as today I haven't seen a statement that VSAN should require distributed switch, so I suppose any version of vSphere can leverage VSAN.
Cormac Hogan has a series of posts on VSAN.
What he says about VSAN:
And there are no additional VIBs or appliances to deploy either. VSAN is baked completely into vSphere 5.5. All components required to create a VSAN product are built into ESXi and vCenter server (both the Windows and the appliance version).
Nice….
Here is my video of VSAN. It's nested environment, so don't look at the speed of the UI, rather see where is which component etc… It's certainly a very nice piece of software and I'm really looking forward to testing it in real – physical lab -:)
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