Together with announcing vSphere 6, VMware also announced Virtual SAN version 6. Virtual SAN is the software-defined storage offering from VMware that enables pooling of storage capabilities within exsisting servers. VMware also announced vSphere Virtual Volumes, which is a set of storage APIs that will enable a more granular integration between external storage (SAN/NAS) and VMware vSphere at the individual virtual machine level.
Version 6 provides the following new features:
- Two-tier all-flash architecture where flash devices are used for both caching and data persistence
- Up to seven million IOPS on a 64-Node VMware Virtaul SAN cluster
- 64 nodes per cluster, allowing for 6,400 VM’s per cluster
- Incresed snapshot depth to 32 per VM
- Intelligent placement of VM objects across server racks
The initial set of VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes-enabled storage products, expected to become available in first-half of 2015, will be delivered by Atlantis Computing, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, NEC, NetApp, NexGen Storage, Pure Storage, Symantec and Tintri.
VMware Virtual SAN is priced at $2,495 per CPU. VMware Virtual SAN for Desktop is priced at $50 per user. The new All-Flash architecture will be available as on add-on to VMware Virtual SAN 6 and will be priced at $1,495 per CPU and $30 per desktop. VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes will be packaged as a feature in VMware vSphere Standard Edition and above as well as VMware vSphere ROBO editions.