VMware Virtual SAN is a new hypervisor-converged, software-defined storage platform that is fully integrated with VMware vSphere. Virtual SAN aggregates locally attached disks of hosts that are members of a vSphere cluster, to create a distributed shared storage solution.
Virtual SAN is a hybrid disk system that leverages both flash-based devices to provide optimal performance, and magnetic disks, to provide capacity and persistent data storage. This delivers enterprise performance and a resilient storage platform.
The distributed datastore of Virtual SAN is an object storage system that leverages the vSphere Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) framework to deliver application-centric storage services and capabilities that are centrally managed through vSphere virtual machine storage policies.
This document discusses how Virtual SAN design choices exploit data locality to deliver superior aggregate performance while retaining simplicity and efficiency.
