VMware vSAN

We have used vSAN to store our SQL databases. We have migrated them from an [all-flash] storage vendor and at the same time, we have migrated the SQL servers in active/passive clusters to [Always-On clusters]. Currently[,] we have 6 nodes for all our SQL production databases. We created an isolated cluster in vSAN so we [would] solve two main issues: SQL licenses (associated with hosts' CPUs) and storage [licenses] (associated with a storage box). We have [configured] different kinds of raids [(5, 6, and 10)] [depending] on each VM service.

We recommend VMware vSAN to our customers , especially where the customer does not want to use any external storage. VMware vSAN combines all the storage of servers installed in a cluster and creates a unified storage pool for the applications running on those servers. This is basically a hyper-converged solution, which can be used by many customers efficiently to run their applications.

We use VMware vSAN for our virtual production environment where we run the most of our business-critical applications. We are running multiple VMs off this setup. Our servers are located across 2 different buildings but data is transferred seamlessly. It's a different setup than we used before. It's nice to be able to just add more hardware to a server to increase performance.

We use vSAN for our production environment where we run the business-critical services: ERP, VDI, HRM, EMAIL, Active Directory, DNS other in-house applications. We also have an iSCSI storage for the production environment with a few SATA disks. vSAN is built with 2xSSD and 4xSAS disks, with 2 disk groups on each host. This vSAN configuration gives us faster IOPS than the iSCSI storage we have. It reduces the cost of additional hardware, maintenance, and power consumption.

vSAN is a hyper-converged solution and it is easy to set up and meets various workload requirements with support for all-flash. It is integrated with all VMware products and so it helps to achieve Day0/Day1 operations seamlessly. It scale-out and scale-up very well and would be a good choice for many organizations.