Question

Write a brief report (half a page) describing the benefits of a VSAN along with the basic steps needed to setup a simple VSAN environment.

Answer 1

Benefits of VSAN:

The VSAN is the most simplest and the hyper-converged storage for the environments which are virtualized.

There are various benefits with the usage of VSAN as described below.

• Simplicity
• Manageability
• Agility
• Lower Total cost of ownership

Simplicity:

The VSAN is simple as stated in the definition and it is very easier to manage.The VSAN is embedded in a hypervisor. This makes the configuration and the installation more simpler with a few mouse clicks with the help of vSphere web client.

Despite being the new technology, many applications find their wide dependencies on VSAN and it's easier to migrate to VSAN environment from current using platforms.This makes the usage of VSAN simpler.

Manageability:

The VSAN environment is a hyper-converged storage solution and it not only offers easier setup but also has wide range of advantages that are associated with it.

It is easier to manage and provision.Various organisations and applications depend and trust the VSAN environment that keeps their businesses running. A scalable infrastructure is built using VSAN with lower costs than traditional SAN environments.

Agility:

The storage requirements of the applications change with time. So the storage requirements must be met and the storage solution must be designed in such a way that the system can store the data based on demand and need.

VSAN allows the users of it to use upto 90K OPS per host ans it can scale upto 64 hosts.This makes the VSAN environment more agile.

Lower Total cost of ownership:

The best thing about the VSAN environment is that it allows us to deploy it on inexpensive and lower cost servers as well. This allows the customers to reduce the investments.

This reduces the cost of ownership to a large extent and improves the profits.

These are the various benefits of VSAN.

Setup simple VSAN environment:

Before the VSAN environment setup,there are few prerequisites as shown below

• create a cluster
• Add hosts to cluster

Steps:

1. Open the existing cluster in vSphere Web client
2. Select configure tab
3. Below VSAN, click General button and select configure.
4. Click VSAN Capabilities and under this, select fault tolerance mode for the cluster(Option: Do not configure is selected by default)
5. Select Next
6. In the network validation page, identify VSAN VMKernel adapter settings
7. Click Next
8. In the Claim disks page, select disks required by the cluster and click next
9. Complete the configuration based on fault tolerance mode.

• If you click on Configure two host VSAN cluster, select witness host and claim disks for it.
• If you click on configure stretched cluster, we have to define fault domain, witness host, and claim disks for the witness host
• If you click on configure fault domains, we have to define the fault domains for cluster.

Finally, On the Ready to complete page, select Finish to complete the setup of VSAN.