VMware’s Virtual SAN to address software-defined storage

VMware has been talking for the last couple of years about the ongoing evolution and transformation of the enterprise infrastructure into a software-defined data center (SDDC). As part of that discussion, the company said it is focusing on three key strategies in 2014: end-user computing, software-defined data center, and hybrid cloud, which VMware called a seamless extension of the SDDC into the public cloud. The virtualization giant believes this IT transformation will present a $50 billion market opportunity by 2016.

VMware also sees a bright future as its server virtualization technologies continue to evolve to enable this market. But the company knows server virtualization is just another checklist item on the way to completing the SDDC. VMware has every intention of working its way down that checklist in order to virtualize and automate the remaining “unvirtualized” components of the data center.

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I recently discussed VMware’s plans to check off network virtualization from that list when it introduced VMware NSX. Although the company’s network virtualization technology has only been readily available since Q4 2013, Carl Eschenbach, VMware’s president and chief operating officer, said he expects to see an accelerated pace of network virtualization adoption as companies move to the SDDC.

VMware continued this push for SDDC at its recent Partner Exchange (PEX) conference, held earlier this month at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. During the event, VMware focused a significant amount of attention on a third checklist item: software-defined storage. Even though VMware already has a number of partners addressing this challenge — including Nutanix, Scale Computing, Simplivity, Nimble Storage, and Tintri — that hasn’t stopped the company from developing its own technology. Much to the chagrin of its current storage partners, VMware put a spotlight at PEX on one of its latest technologies, VMware Virtual SAN.

Virtual SAN is not new; the technology was previewed during the VMworld 2013 keynote presentation six months ago as a new tier of hypervisor-converged storage. Prior to that, VMware had been promoting a smaller scaled virtual appliance called vSphere Storage Appliance, which gave small and medium-sized companies without a shared storage environment the ability to use enterprise features like vMotion, data recovery, and business continuity. Virtual SAN, on the other hand, is a new product that is built directly into the vSphere kernel, and it is targeted at commercial and enterprise segment organizations.

VMware explained the technology: “Virtual SAN pools hardware resources provided by industry-standard x86 servers with internal magnetic disks and server-side flash to produce fast and resilient shared storage for virtual machines (VMs). VMware Virtual SAN simplifies storage administration due to its unique management approach based on VM-centric policies and built-in automation.”

The company also said Virtual SAN is a key building block of the VMware software-defined storage vision and enables the delivery of storage functionality as software built into the VMware vSphere kernel, providing a deep integration into the industry-leading virtualization management platform.

Chuck Hollis, a VMware chief strategist for the SAS business unit, explained:

Being fully integrated with the vSphere kernel brings some notable advantages. One clear advantage is performance and efficiency — there’s no need to traverse multiple VMs just to do IO.

But a potentially bigger advantage is the integration with the vast VMware suite: snaps, replication, vMtion, vCOps, vCAC, SRM, etc. For VMware customers, everything works as one would expect: no plug-ins, no extra work required, etc.

Virtual SAN is currently in beta and has more than 10,000 registered participants putting it through its paces. Because these beta users have been testing it for the past six months, once launched it shouldn’t be your typical 1.0 product released by VMware. There’s a good chance most of the bugs will have been worked out.

After launch, Virtual SAN is expected to announce at least a 16-node support. Since each Virtual SAN node can support up to 35 disk drives (in addition to up to five SSD or PCI-e flash devices), that equates to 560 spindles in a single Virtual SAN cluster, which brings its raw capacity upward of a petabyte.

Companies who want to deploy Virtual SAN will have two options:

• Use VMware Virtual SAN Ready Nodes — For those companies that prefer to use a pre-integrated appliance approach, VMware is working with server partners to create a set of servers that are pre-configured and certified as compatible with Virtual SAN, simplifying the configuration and procurement process, and making sure it is optimized for things like performance and capacity.
• Leverage a component-based hardware compatibility list — For those companies that choose to go the route of building a custom solution, VMware is making a Virtual SAN hardware compatibility list available that includes a host of certified and supported flash devices, hard disk drives, I/O controllers, and solid state storage devices.

VMware announced during PEX that Virtual SAN is gaining support from quite a number of companies, including Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fusion-io, HP, IBM, SanDisk, and Seagate to name a few.

At the time of general availability, it is expected that more than 150 components as well as 10 Ready Nodes will be certified with VMware Virtual SAN. VMware said it expects additional components to be certified over time.

We still don’t know how much Virtual SAN will cost or how it will be licensed, but VMware has stated that it expects the technology to become GA sometime this quarter, so it shouldn’t be much longer until pricing and licensing are officially announced.

More information may soon be forthcoming, as VMware announced an upcoming online event that will takes place on March 6. The company is billing “VMware NOW: Virtual SAN Special Online Event” as a chance to hear “exciting product news.” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and the company’s newly crowned CTO Ben Fathi will deliver the announcements during the hour-long event.

This article, “VMware’s Virtual SAN to address software-defined storage,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.