New Technical White Paper - What’s New in VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN)

At the annual VMworld conference, VMware has introduced their vision for the software-defined datacenter (SDDC) in the future. The SDDC is the architecture for the cloud by VMware in which all pillars of the datacenter, including compute, storage, networks and associated services, are virtualized. In this white paper, they look at one aspect of the SDDC of VMware, the storage pillar. We specifically discuss how a new product called Virtual SAN (VSAN) fits into this vision.


VSAN is a new storage solution from VMware that is fully integrated with vSphere. It automatically aggregates server disks in a cluster to create shared storage that can be rapidly provisioned from VMware vCenter during VM creation. It is an object-based storage system and a platform for VM Storage Policies designed to simplify virtual machine storage placement decisions for vSphere administrators.

It is fully integrated with core vSphere features such as VMware vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA), VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (vSphere DRS) and VMware vSphere vMotion. Its goal is to provide both high availability and scale-out storage functionality.

It can also be considered in the context of quality of service (QoS) because VM Storage Policies can be created that define the level of performance and availability required on a per–virtual machine basis. 

Download: What’s New in VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN)