Before you start learning more about the vSAN, it's important to understand how the vSAN differs from conventional shared storage. Although having many similarities to conventional storage arrays, vSAN behaves and performs differently overall.
vSAN and traditional storage differ in the following key ways:
- vSAN does not require external networked storage for storing virtual machine files remotely, such as on a Fiber Channel (FC) or Storage Area Network (SAN).
- vSAN does not behave like traditional storage volumes based on LUNs or NFS shares. The iSCSI target service uses LUNs to enable an initiator on a remote host to transport block-level data to a storage device in the vSAN cluster.
- Certain common storage protocols, including FCP, are inapplicable to vSAN.
- Using traditional storage, the storage administrator pre-allocates storage space on different storage systems. vSAN automatically turns the local physical storage resources of the ESXi hosts into a single pool of storage. These pools can be divided and assigned to virtual machines and applications according to their quality-of-service requirements.
- vSAN is highly integrated with vSphere. You do not need dedicated plug-ins or a storage console for vSAN, compared to traditional storage. You can deploy, manage, and monitor vSAN by using the vSphere Client.
- With vSAN, VM storage policies are automatically assigned when you deploy new VMs. The storage policies can be changed dynamically as needed.
- A dedicated storage administrator does not need to manage vSAN. Instead a vSphere administrator can manage a vSAN environment.
Both VSAN and conventional storage each have advantages and disadvantages of their own. You must evaluate your needs and select the solution that is appropriate for your company.
Thank you for reading!
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