Vsan is enterprise class storage virtualization software that when combined with vsphere allows you to manage compute and storage with a single platform with vsan you can reduce the cost and complexity of traditional storage and take the easiest path to hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid cloud evolve to an integrated hyperconverged infrastructure hci solution.
Vsan vs object storage.
The vmware vsan 7 update 1 release added the vsan data persistence platform that enables software vendors to add plugins to complement vsan s file and block storage.
This allows for the partitioning or combination of the full storage capacity as needed.
Object storage is the only option that can effectively store this data at scale.
The data can be anything you want to store from a family photo to a 400 000 page manual for assembling an aircraft.
What is vmware vsan.
These rules affect the number of components that make up an object.
Simply put virtualized storage refers to the abstraction of storage.
Virtual san is highly.
Some standard storage protocols such as fcp do not apply to virtual san.
Object storage also referred to as object based storage is a general term that refers to the way in which we organize and work with units of storage called objects.
When you provision a virtual machine on a virtual san datastore virtual san creates an object for each virtual disk.
As an example let s take that same 600gb virtual disk and apply the vsan default storage policy which uses the raid 1 mirroring failure tolerance method and has the number of failures to tolerate set to one.
Initially the data persistence platform supports dell emc objectscale and object storage from cloudian and minio and datastax s apache casandra based database as a service.
Another component is there which is witness which helps to avoid the split brain scenarios.
Virtual san has no concept of traditional storage volumes based on luns or nfs shares although 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 virtual san cluster.
Components is the disks of the vm which is vmdk.
Object is comprised of multiple components.
Virtualized storage or vsan.
Virtual san stores and manages data in the form of flexible data containers called objects.
Every object contains three things.
A software layer sits between the server usually a virtual machine providing an abstracted version of the underlying physical storage.
For additional overviews on object storage read our previous blog post in this series object storage vs file storage for a clearer side by side comparison of block storage vs object storage take a look at the table below.
Vsan is an object based storage.