VM /ETC

Virtual SAN Appliance for VMware ESX

I’ve been hearing about it all week. The President of my company sent me an email about this at the start of the conference. I finally got to talk to the LeftHand team at their booth today about their new virtual appliance – VSA.

You can download a trial version of VSA here.

Some notes about implementing VSA:

1. you must reserve 1 GB ram for VSA on each ESX host
2. you must reserve 2 GHz cpu for VSA on each ESX host
3. you must create a dedicated Gigabit virtual switch for VSA on each ESX host

After you configure the VSA VMs on each of your local ESX VMFS they are clustered and data is “striped” between all hosts. Then if one host goes down the data is still available to the VMs as they are VMotion-ed or restarted via HA on the other hosts.

The VSA has native ability to do SAN based replication via the WAN.

I was told the cost if each VSA is approximately $5K.

My thoughts:

• Yes, this is a nifty way to demo ESX on your notebook. In fact, it let’s me take 2 or 3 notebooks and create a mobile demo of VI3.
• Yes, it’s an efficient use of local storage on an ESX server
• Maybe, would I want this solution at a small branch office, but if so I would definitely use the WAN replication to ensure failover to a physical, enterprise SAN.
• No, I do not want this solution for all of my VMs and all of my ESX hosts. I have some reservations about forcing my ESX host to virtualize and replicate storage. I want my ESX hosts to do what they do best – host VMs.
• If your VI is greater than 2 ESX hosts you are spending more than $10K. I would rather spend that money on a physical SAN. There are a few iSCSI and FC solutions that are in that range ~3TB. NetAPP, for example, has WAN based SAN replication features around that cost.

So, VSA really did not live up to the hype for me. I will definitely recommend LeftHand Networks SAN/iQ as a virtual SAN, but not running on the local VMFS of each VI3 server. I’d suggest that a client take the servers that were just P2V-ed and turn their local storage into a SAN.

Besides, local storage will quickly become a thing of the past with the announcement of ESX 3i, right?

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