vSAN Lite

During the London VMUG last week I had the fortune to speak to Paudie ORiordan (@oriorp) and this was an excellent opportunity to express some views of storage with VMware

We started talking about the roadmap of vSAN and also its adoption. I explained that I have had thought of using the product for a few deployments but there tends to still be a view of keeping storage and processing separate regardless of SDDC or hyper converged solutions being out there. I still think this is a general fear within most IT guys but best kept for a separate post.

I explained that in the past I had used PernixData due to the ease of integration with any type of back end storage and configuring some simple VMs and SSDs with the hosts. This is at the point where we discussed it would be a great opportunity for VMware. We exchanged the thoughts of the fact some end users still find it hard to comprehend the whole converged set up or even move away from traditional storage. Sometime this being down to a recent major investment in traditional storage.

This is where the idea of ‘vSAN lite’ came to fruition, the concept of being able to trial the benefits of vSAN by adding some SSDs to your hosts but still leverage your back end storage. I thought this was something they could work on due to the ROFC being depreciated from the VMware VSphere product line. Oddly enough I had used this a few times in the past.

I know VMware would find this quite hard to position and they would be worried that the adoption of the vSAN product may decrease but maybe if it was offered as a trial only with no extensions this would provide the best of both world. The end user to not only reap the benefits and also be able to capture the required statistics to sell it back to their steering committee or board but also see the real world experience.  Maybe during the trials there could be an agreement where all statistics could be sent to VMware for analysis and also for publications on real world IO savings and IOPS charts. What would also make this sing is the use case for each deployment such as VDI, Processing or standard infrastructure.

I do also wonder though if it may be easier for VMWare to acquire PernixData and then embed this into their road map.

*Disclaimer:- All these views are from my side of the conversation. This may not go to production and may not be a viable option for VMware or Paudie