VSANchat

.@vmwarevsan try out VSAN in the HOL! http://labs.hol.vmwa....

@jasemccarty Fantastic advice! +1! :)

.@vmwarevsan or enable it on your dev/test/non-prod lab environment with appropriate gear.

I agree 10000% HOL is a great way to get started.

+1mil

Don't overthink it. VSAN is actually that simple.

Ryan is right, Radically Simple, amazing performance with scale and MUCH less expensive than big iron.

get the book... http://www.yellow-br...

I'm a fan of a few…
Deduplication & Compression / Erasure Coding on AF VSAN 6.2, Sparse Swap, New Performance Service, are just a few.

@jasemccarty dedup/compress for #AllFlash is transformational for @vmwarevsan deployments

@vGazza DD+C/EC are great in AF VSAN 6.2 https://www.vmware.c...

Space Efficiency makes all flash cost less than most hybrid solutions. Performance Server is cool under the hood how it runs its database on the object store directly not on vCenter.

@jasemccarty good feature set but the overall solid support and enabling for all-flash configurations is the best attribute of 6.2

simplicity & low overhead of dedupe/compression ... no per-VM tweaks or more HW needed - set it and forget it!

Must say, space efficiency

@peglarr it is pretty much a no brainer when deciding to go All-Flash with VSAN!

@peglarr +1!

@jasemccarty there is no question any longer - all-flash is now the clear choice going forward

.@peglarr have to agree! Wicked fast performance, combined with a lower $/GB than traditional spinning, makes All-Flash VSAN a great choice!

common use cases include VDI, Business Critical Apps, Management Clusters… We've seen some pretty large clusters.

according to @gartner_inc virtual desktop infrastructure is a first order use case

I see ROBO deployments a big use case in my business

@TimKoishor that's what I'm talking about! WooHoo VSAN #ROBO!

@TimKoishor You might like this recent Virtual Blocks blog post, Tim! https://blogs.vmware...

A survey of >100 #VSAN users showed that their #1 use case was business critical apps! #enterpriseready

Disaster Recovery sites as well. The 5min RPO is impressive.

Thanks @MichaelJHaag. Thought so !

we see many customers start with 3 nodes. Great thing about VSAN, is performance is linear, & its easy to grow a node at a time w/expected results.

is it the main uptake route from POC to prod? in the process of doing purchase of POC hybrid solution. AF for time being out of budget

#VSAN also scales up: need capacity, add drives to nodes; or expand cache of nodes for performance boost

yep have left space for drive expansion in all 3 dell servers. also have space for nvme PCIe. i'm aiming at 120k iops as avg from the 3 node.

be sure to price out AF as prices are dropping fast - if workload can hit 2-3x reduction from dedupe/compression, it's often the lowest cost option ... and if FTT=2, tipping point happens faster

check out pages 3 & 4 on our Space Efficiency WP with some numbers from a few months back: https://www.vmware.c...

AF price in Ireland (€) is still OTT for the capacity drives. Once new 7tb\13tb range launch end of 2016 it might drive the cost into my budget range for the 2 new hosts i'll need in 2017

got it ... and yes, we're seeing a lot of regional differences in prices still but I'm hopeful that evens out throughout this year!

Brexit could really disrupt some PO's over the next 6 months. Any news on hybrid getting the nice AF features

SA is the same where AF is still the expensive option based on Flash prices

@Pinballas it might be surprising… AF does require ADV lic, but w/some SSD capacity drives ~= to the very similar HDD, DD+C/EC can drastically lower $/GB w/AF architectures.

it does pose another question - How many people question the 3 tier license model

.@vmwarevsan me!!! 2 Sandy Bridge boxes w/@Micron flash, running build (redacted) so I can use (redacted) (redacted) (redacted) and (redacted) (redacted).

we are in process of setting up a 2 node lab

@jasemccarty haha.. All components bought and in shipping. will begin build with latest stable shortly. :)

I have 7 NUC's in my house for the home cluster.

@Lost_Signal I assume this is the HomeLab you discussed on the most recent Virtually Speaking podcast?