VMware VSAN has six dot six appeal

VMware says it has upped flash IO performance by half with the latest vSAN version, as well as adding myriad point feature updates. The software is built to provide a virtual SAN by aggregating the locally-attached storage of a cluster of VMware host nodes into a shared block-access resource. It is the fundamental storage …

[Anonymous Coward]

"...and the VMware-supporting version of Nutanix’s HCI."

Nope.

Nope.

Nope.

Still nope.

[virtualgeek]

Re: "...and the VMware-supporting version of Nutanix’s HCI."

Disclosure - Chad Sakac @ Dell EMC here.

Anonymous Coward is right - when you use Nutanix, it's always on their SDS stack, and I don't anticipate this changing. If you use VMware on Nutanix, it's really using ESX/vCenter - and that's about it (not vSAN, not NSX, not vRealize). This isn't the right place to be discussing the pros and cons of the various SDS stacks, approaches, data services and IO paths - and I suspect that if I did, the thread would spiral out of control :-)

Congrats to the VMware vSAN team - a huge release (amazing to consider it a .dot release), looking forward to bringing it to a lot of customers in all 3 forms (software-only, software on our Dell EMC PowerEdge vSAN-Ready Nodes, and on the turnkey HCI form in VxRail and VxRack SDDC)

[TheVogon]

But $2500 a CPU. lol?! Cheaper in most large cases to buy a decent array.

[MMull]

Well, less expensive than the licensing options from e.g. 3Par/HPE StoreServ....

[Anonymous Coward]

In most large cases...

Deploying VSAN at scale, there are discounts. It's a software product so your incremental COGs are generating a license key.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a ROBO or Specific Workset option...

But as a complete datacenter replacement? I don't think so

And by the time you buy all SSD's (because most of the VSAN features require SSD's), make sure everything is on the HCL (which has gotten much more forgiving, I will admit), and then license VSAN based on your socket per node count...you could have had a MUCH more feature rich and versatile SAN.

I get the lure of HCI, but there are still too many gotcha's, and having the best of breed servers, storage, and Hypervisor is STILL a much better idea than trying to jam it all together. Especially when you know before your start that there are drawbacks...and we all know there are drawbacks. No matter what the marketing info says!!