Among all the announcements made in the first day of VMworld 2013, the public beta of VMware Virtual SAN technology is one of the most interesting.
Virtual SAN is a software-defined storage tier embedded directly within vSphere 5.5 hypervisor (but licensed separately) and constitutes (with NSX) one of the key components of VMware’s vision of software-defined datacenter.
vSAN leverages the local storage (each host will require at least one SSD and one magnetic disk) from a number of ESXi hosts (limited to 8 in the beta) that belongs to a cluster and presents the aggregate as a single shared datastore.
This datastore can be used exactly as a “standard” one, for example for VM placement, vMotion, DRS and HA and could be scaled-out on the fly adding additional physical storage to the hosts.
In terms of QoS administrators can create VM Storage Policies defining performances and availability needs on a per virtual machine level even if the VMs share the same datastore.
You can subscribe to the public beta from today at this link.
For a technical in-depth we suggest the post by Duncan Epping.