The big news in the vSphere world these days is “VSAN†–Virtual SAN, now supported as part of vSphere 5.5 U1. Virtual SAN represents a new approach to storage designed for virtual environments. With Virtual SAN, VI admins can create a shared pool of storage from locally attached disks in a vSphere cluster.
You can think of Virtual SAN as part of the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)—it’s software-defined storage. Because Virtual SAN is embedded in vSphere kernel, it’s an example of hypervisor-controlled storage’ as opposed to a storage virtual machine running alongside other virtual machines. VI admin-created storage policies determine VSAN’s behavior, and it’s supported on any server that you’ll find on the vSphere HCL.
While there’s plenty of good technical materials available, what does a busy VI admin need to know to get started?
We’ve assembled this short list of “must-knows†for every vSphere professional.
