VSANchat

#VSANchat - Talking VSAN 6.2!
Join #VSANchat as we discuss Virtual SAN 6.2!
   9 years ago
#VSANchatTalking everything VMware VSANJoin #VSANchat to discuss updates, questions and more around VMware Virtual SAN 6.1!
   8 years ago
#VSANchat#VSANchat - All Things VSAN!Join #VSANchat as we discuss your topics and questions around VMware Virtual SAN 6.2!
VMware vSAN
Thanks for joining today's chat! If you have more questions/comments you'd like to discuss, tweet at us! Go #VSAN!
Rob Peglar
Thank you for hosting!
VMware vSAN
Q4: What do you see/What are the top use cases for #VSAN?
Keith Townsend - Light will overcome darkness
At the start? VSAN could be the starting point for a pod design in the large enterprise for general compute pods.
Rodrigo Gazzaneo
more mission critical apps with all flash performance, more VDI with dedup. More use cases.
John Nicholson
VDI/EUC. If your deploying Horizon on anything else we have likely failed to communicate something.
Keith Townsend - Light will overcome darkness
VSAN is also getting to the point where it should be the option for SMB greenfields.
Jase McCarty
6.1 introduced 2 node support & ROBO licensing to make it easier for SMBs!
Rob Peglar
Really, as the name implies, use cases that are today homed on frame-based SAN, host-to-fabric topologies transition to VSAN using local devices...the serverfication of storage.
John Nicholson
@CTOAdvisor In my former job I did some greenfield SMB deployments. Going single socket per host cuts licensing down a bit.
Rodrigo Gazzaneo
@peglarr I liked the "serverfication of storage"! SDS + HCI = Server SANs
Rob Peglar
Agree. SMBs are moving back to 1-socket and many enterprises are moving back to 2-socket as their 'standard'. Always some use cases of course for super beefy servers.
Rodrigo Gazzaneo
@jasemccarty I found it a great neologism! "serverfication"
Rob Peglar
Yes Jase - a nice 'word' one of our Micron folks coined. I kinda like it...quite descriptive actually.
VMware vSAN
Q3: All-Flash or Hybrid? Why?
Rob Peglar
I can see existing hybrid staying put and upgrading to 6.2. But for nearly all other use cases, all-flash makes sense.
Jase McCarty
going forward, all-flash for performance and economics… But Hybrid isn't left behind. Lots of new additions across both architectures!
Chuck Cocker
all-flash to take advantage of the new features, dedupe and RAID5/6
John Furrier
@emcdssd announced yesterday two things (1) new product category Rack-Scale Flash and (2) our first product the DSSD D5
Rodrigo Gazzaneo
@jasemccarty it will be a transition but it won't be long. 15Ks are gone.
Jase McCarty
@vGazza 10K's are way long in the tooth. They'll be out the door pretty soon.
Rob Peglar
Actually the economics of 2.5" SAS 10K - very popular - are not as good as 2.5" SSDs. The only area left for HDD is slow rotating. Even that will begin to subside given dense 3D NAND SSDs in the future.
John Nicholson
@jasemccarty My thoughts on why 10K is dead by the end of the year. https://blogs.vmware...
Jase McCarty
If you aren't familiar with the new Space Efficiency Technologies in Virtual SAN 6.2, we released a white paper on them today. http://www.vmware.co...
Rodrigo Gazzaneo
thanks for sharing. Dedup and compression are key for Flash efficiency.
Jase McCarty
@vGazza absolutely! Dedupe & Compression as well as Erasure Coding are great additions for All-Flash architectures.
Michael Haag
Agree @vGazza ... we're getting to that cost tipping point where from a system level for primary storage, all-flash must be considered!
Jase McCarty
When Deduplication/Compression are enabled, along with Erasure Coding (especially FTT=2), there is definitely a tipping point.
Rodrigo Gazzaneo
2016 is the year of Flash as primary storage for broad use cases
Jase McCarty
at 2x reduction using Deduplication/Compression, along with Erasure Coding (RAID6/FTT=2), we're seeing a VSAN solution cost reduction of 28% (using list prices & no discounts) when using All-Flash vs. Hybrid.
Rob Peglar
Agree Jase - we are today at the point where all-flash has superior TCO to hybrid in nearly all cases. We see this all the time. Sounds nearly unbelievable, but the math is there.
Rodrigo Gazzaneo
@peglarr Moore's Law beat mechanics again, this time in storage
Jase McCarty
Using some online (major vendor) numbers, I put this together: http://www.jasemccar...
Showing how much cheaper All-Flash can be.
Rob Peglar
Just wait for the 3D NAND devices to mainstream - that's when it gets really, really interesting...
John Nicholson
@peglarr Breaking the $1 per GB barrier for usable storage is big. It changes people's perception that storage performance is worth managing on the primary storage layer.
Ken Werneburg
Really love the ease of management - expanded health check, performance, capacity, etc. all top notch changes.
Jase McCarty
gotta love the ability to deep dive at the Cluster, Host, Disk Group, Disk, and vmdk levels to see performance metrics!
Vahid Fereydouny
In many conversations I have had with our customers that is one of the best features/enhancements we have made. Our customers love HealthUI...
Rob Peglar
The additional instrumentation one can visualize via vCenter is really helpful. Expose as much as possible...instead of having to use RVC.
Jase McCarty
@peglarr I'm kind of liking the RVC lately… but I don't miss VSAN Observer…
Vahid Fereydouny
@peglarr yes. We want to expose all the operations through HealthUI and webclient. No more RVC :-)
Vahid Fereydouny
@peglarr we expect RVC to be used only for our support and maybe for customers who really want to have that level of access. Otherwise everything will be in webclient and no need for command lines anymore
Rob Peglar
RVC is a fine tool, but I worry (for my customers) about security, authentication, etc. RVC is a very sharp knife. I suspect many companies will forbid its use unless in strict maintenance periods. Life in the big enterprise city.
Vahid Fereydouny
@peglarr completely agreed. That is my expectation as well. That is the main reason we are exposing everything though webclient now. Also we are releasing SKD/APIs very soon as well
Rob Peglar
While the data reduction techniques are a great add, personally I like the ability to control QoS and give fine-grained control. Very valuable as you scale out.
Vahid Fereydouny
It is great to hear that. What would be your main use case for this?
Rob Peglar
The customers we talk to, since (full disclosure) we make very fast devices, are concerned that a given user will consume all or nearly all their 'horsepower'. QoS is a way to control that. Very useful in multi-tenant environments.
Vahid Fereydouny
great. Managing noisy neighbor is one of the key use cases we had in mind when we added this feature.
Rob Peglar
Also, while it's quite specific, the I/O scheduling which first went into 6.0 really shines using all-flash in 6.2.
Vahid Fereydouny
the other use case we had in mind was to ensure that the order of provisioning applications will not impact their performance. Without QoS the early VM/apps could take all the resources. QoS will add value here as well
Rob Peglar
Quite true. Adding QoS gives the environment a much greater ability to be 'fair' and allow all users to run/apps to execute according to business priorities
VMware vSAN
Q1: What new feature of #VSAN 6.2 are you most excited about?
Jase McCarty
I'm particular to Sparse Swap files… I love the fact that I can choose to reserve this space or not. And it works on Hybrid and All-Flash architectures.
Jase McCarty
I even put together a @PowerCLI script for it. http://www.jasemccar...
Rob Bishop
great article about powercli and Sparse Virtual Swap files. Thank you
Jase McCarty
Appreciated Rob Bishop!