VSAN PoC Options

[dav23]

Where I work, our VSphere environment is running on HP Blades with SAN storage. This has worked well but performance has never been great. We are just about at our maximum SAN capacity and we are looking to shift directions.

After months of looking at the various solutions, we have whittled our options down to buying Simplivity nodes or deploying an all-flash VSAN solution.

Simplivity has been very aggressive with sales visits and demos and are pushing us hard into a PoC. We are certainly impressed with Simplivity's approach but we are unsure it can handle our needs in a cost effective way.

The idea of a turnkey solution is appealing but we believe bang for the buck favors building a VSAN cluster.

We're trying to determine if there is an economical way to build a small VSAN PoC that would emulate a relative fraction of what we can expect from a VSAN build.

Is it plausible to build a nested environment with fast flash storage that would provide decent performance. My budget max is about $7,500.

I was thinking a dual socket system with 256GB RAM, a couple of NVMe PCIe SSDs for flash tier and some SAS 6Gbps SSDs in RAID 0 for capacity tier. I realize that nested virtualization is going to provide a performance hit and it's not supported, but we need a lab environment anyway and if it could validate some level of performance it would put some folks concerns here at ease.

Any helpful feedback would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Child of Wonder]

VSAN will definitely get you the converged storage, but won't do anything to address deduplication, backups, or replication. Are those already covered with other products you already use?

 

[lopoetve]

Servers or VDI?

VSAN doesn't perform well nested at all, unless your back end storage is capable of pushing a LOT of very-low-latency IOPS (disclaimer: I worked at VMware VERY closely with VSAN). Even then, there will be a significant penalty in performance. It's better in 6.0, which is what I assume you're testing, but still not great.

Honestly, PoCing it on lower-end hardware with just 3 nodes is better than nested if you can.

 

[dav23]

Thanks for your reply. We have been looking at Veeam if we go with VSAN. We're currently using NetBackup.

The only reason Simplivity is in the conversation is because of the be-dupe, backup and replication features it has. Very elegant.

 

[dav23]

Servers, we have a fairly diverse environment, mostly home grown file processing and data hygiene apps. The trend here lately is big data tools, lots of Cloudera, Hadoop, Spark & Cassandra, Vertica, and whatever is going to come out next.

We would definitely roll on 6.0. Thanks for your feedback, I'll start spec'ing out a 3 node cluster.

 

[Child of Wonder]

Thanks for your reply. We have been looking at Veeam if we go with VSAN. We're currently using NetBackup.

The only reason Simplivity is in the conversation is because of the be-dupe, backup and replication features it has. Very elegant.

Yeah, they're pretty awesome. Their dedup and backups are great. Biggest hurdle is showing the operational value while the pricetag ends up being higher than many other solutions.

 

[lopoetve]

Cassandra and Hadoop will ~slaughter~ anything but an extremely highly specced VSAN deployment - the system as a whole struggles with the large block commands they generate, and Cassandra is almost all 128k SCSI commands - the entire thing runs with that, and Hadoop is the same since it was designed for local disks. Cloudera is the same from my limited time with it, but I don't have nearly as much experience with it as I do the others.

 

[dav23]

Thanks again for the feedback!