SOLUTION OVERVIEW

VMware vSAN
Remote Office Deployment

Native vSphere Storage for Remote and Branch Offices

VMware® vSAN™ is the industry-leading software powering Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions.
vSAN is optimized for VMware vSphere® virtual machines and natively integrated with vSphere. Since drives
internal to the vSphere hosts are used to create a vSAN datastore, there is no dependency on expensive,
difficult to manage, external shared storage.

Remote office environments can benefit from shared storage while

reducing total cost of ownership. Deploy vSAN on two or more physical
vSphere hosts using industry-standard server components to avoid
large, up-front investments in purpose-built storage hardware. Lower
operational expenses by automating management of storage services
through policies. Services such as availability, performance, and
capacity consumption are controlled on a per-VM basis. vSAN and
storage policies are easily configured and managed using the familiar
and user-friendly vSphere Web Client. There is no need for
administrators and branch managers to learn a separate tool just for
managing storage. Management can be performed from a central
location or delegated using VMware vCenter Server™ roles and
permissions.
Take advantage of exceptional performance and high availability. Built on an optimized I/O data path in the
vSphere hypervisor, vSAN delivers better performance than basic local storage, virtual storage appliances,
and external devices. Shared storage enables vSphere features such as VMware vSphere vMotion® and
vSphere High Availability™ (vSphere HA) to minimize planned and unplanned downtime.

vSAN Two-Node Architecture

vSAN can be implemented with as few as two physical vSphere hosts at each office. A witness host – a
virtual machine running ESXi – is the required third node in the vSAN cluster. Witness hosts are typically
deployed to a vSphere environment at a central main data center. The diagram below shows what the high-
level architecture might look like for an organization with one main data center and three remote offices.

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The use of a virtual appliance as a witness host eliminates the need to deploy a third physical server, which
reduces the overall cost of the solution without sacrificing the benefits of shared storage. The witness is
designed specifically to provide quorum services in the event of a physical host failure or loss of network
connectivity between the two physical hosts. A witness host does not contribute to compute and storage
capacities. It is only supported for use in vSAN 2-node and vSAN Stretched Cluster configurations.
Since the witness host does not serve normal virtual machine read and write requests, network connectivity
requirements are minimal. A WAN connection with 1.5Mbps of available bandwidth and latency as high as
500ms is sufficient to enable communication between the witness host and the two physical nodes of the
vSAN cluster.
Hosts at the remote offices can be directly connected using crossover cables to eliminate the need for an
expensive 10Gb network switch. This reduces deployment and management costs, minimizes complexity,
and improves reliability.

vSAN is built on the concept of fault domains. Each of the physical hosts represents a fault domain. Replicas
of the files that make up a virtual machine are stored in separate fault domains. By default, a replica is
placed on each host of the 2-node configuration. If one of the physical hosts is offline, it is still possible for
virtual machines to run using replicas located on the other physical node. In the case where the hosts in a 2-
node cluster are unable to communicate across the network, the witness host serves as a “tie-breaker” to
achieve a quorum and maintain data accessibility and integrity.
Configuring vSAN for a 2-node implementation is simple. The vSphere Web Client is used to first deploy a
witness host to a location outside of the remote or branch office. This location is typically a primary data
center. Following the witness host deployment, a short wizard is used to create two fault domains. A
physical node is added to each fault domain followed by the selection and configuration of the witness host.

vSAN with vSphere Availability

The use of local disk datastores without vSAN introduces risk to application uptime. For example, only one
copy of a virtual machine’s files is stored on a local disk. If that disk fails, the virtual machine files must be
restored from backup media, which is time consuming and unreliable. It is possible to create a second copy
of virtual machine files on another disk, but the process is not automatic and must be performed frequently.
The recovery from this second copy would also be a manual process increasing risk and recovery time.

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vSAN addresses these challenges by aggregating local disks into a shared datastore distributed across
hosts in the cluster. vSAN features a storage policy rule called “Primary level of failures to tolerate” or
“PFTT”, which defines the number of replicas of a virtual machine’s files to distribute across physical nodes
in the vSAN cluster. For example, when PFTT = 1, vSAN will create and maintain two mirrored replicas of the
virtual machine’s files and place them on separate hosts. If a disk or host containing one of those replicas is
offline, the data is still accessible from the other replica.
vSphere HA requires shared storage and vSAN is tightly integrated
with vSphere HA. If a host fails, virtual machines that were running
on the failed host are automatically rebooted by vSphere HA on
other hosts in the cluster to minimize downtime. vSphere HA can
also monitor guest operating systems and automatically reboot a
virtual machine in the event of an operating system failure such as
a Windows blue screen.

vSphere Fault Tolerance™ is also compatible with vSAN and provides continuous availability for applications
with up to four virtual CPUs in the event of a host failure.
A variety of data protection solutions are available to back up and recover virtual machines and applications
in a vSAN cluster. Check with your data protection vendor to verify support and look for the “VMware
Ready for vSAN” logo. Virtual machine replication solutions such as Dell EMC RecoverPoint® for Virtual
Machines and VMware vSphere Replication™ works seamlessly with vSAN to enable rapid, reliable per-virtual
machine recovery.

vSAN Performance
vSAN is uniquely embedded in the vSphere hypervisor kernel and sits directly in the I/O data path. It can
deliver the highest levels of performance without taxing the CPU or consuming high amounts of memory
resources, as compared to other virtual storage appliances that run separately on top of the hypervisor. All-
flash vSAN configurations provide excellent performance with predictable, low latencies. A combination of
magnetic and solid state drives can be used to enable flash-accelerated hybrid configurations.
Specific rules such as “Number of disk stripes per object” and “Flash read cache reservation (%)” can be
used to accelerate read-intensive workloads – especially in hybrid vSAN configurations. With vSAN, it is
possible to apply policies with precision. For example, database servers are commonly deployed with the
guest OS on one virtual disk and databases on other virtual disks. A storage policy that reserves a higher
percentage of flash read cache could be assigned specifically to the virtual disks containing databases to
help guarantee performance.

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Visibility and Proactive Notifications with vRealize Operations

vSAN includes a health check feature to monitor items such as network connectivity, disk capacity,
component metadata, and compliance with the hardware compatibility list (HCL). While this might be
sufficient in many cases, enhanced visibility and management capabilities across vSAN clusters at
multiple locations are available with VMware vRealize® Operations™. vRealize Operations Manager
includes dashboards for vSAN such as Capacity Overview, Optimize vSAN Deployments, and
Operations Overview.

vRealize Operations features predictive analytics and smart alerts to help ensure optimum performance
and availability of applications and infrastructures. vRealize Operations Manager enables administrators
to monitor several factors such as read and write IOPS, throughput, latency, capacity, cache hits, write
buffer utilization, and bus resets. If there is an issue in the environment, vRealize Operations makes it
easy to review symptoms and recommendations for remediation.

Capacity utilization and time remaining metrics are

also included. vRealize Operations analyzes
consumption trends and provides estimates on the
amount of time remaining before resources are
exhausted. This makes it easier for administrators to
procure additional capacity in a timely manner to
avoid project delays and more serious issues such as
application downtime due to lack of free space.

Add Capacity without Downtime

vSAN is a distributed architecture that allows for elastic, non-disruptive scaling. Compute and storage
capacity is scaled out simply by bringing a new host into the cluster. Storage capacity and performance can
be scaled up independently by adding new drives to existing hosts. This “grow-as-you-go” model provides
predictable, linear scaling for remote office environments with affordable investments spread out over time.

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vSAN for ROBO Licensing

vSAN for ROBO is a per-virtual machine licensing model. vSAN for ROBO licenses are sold in packs of 25. A
pack can be used in a single site or across multiple sites. For example, five sites running five virtual machines
at each location can be licensed with one pack of 25 licenses. This model reduces the overall cost of the
solution and provides deployment flexibility.
It is important to note that a site is limited to one 25-pack of licenses. As an example, a site with 30 virtual
machines cannot use vSAN for ROBO licenses. If a site starts with vSAN for ROBO licensing and grows
beyond the 25-virtual machine licensing limit, the change to vSAN Standard, Advanced, or Enterprise
licensing is easily performed with no virtual machine downtime.

Summary
vSAN and vSphere are the ideal, cost-effective HCI platform for running nearly any virtual machine workload
that requires predictable performance and availability in remote office environments. Important services
such as email, DNS, databases, and business-critical applications can benefit from shared storage without
the cost and complexity of dedicated storage hardware. Virtual machine storage policies are created,
assigned, and modified, as needs change in the environment. vSAN makes it simple to add capacity using a
scale up or scale out approach without incurring downtime. Maintenance windows are easier to schedule
and there are features such as vSphere HA and vSphere Replication to enable rapid recovery from
unplanned downtime. vSAN health monitoring is included and, optionally, vRealize Operations provides
multiple vSAN dashboards for proactive alerting, heat maps, device and cluster insights, streamlined issue
resolution, and capacity management.

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