Seven Things A Virtualization Administrator Should Know About Virtual SAN

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The big news in the vSphere world these days is “VSAN” –Virtual SAN, now supported as part of vSphere 5.5. 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.