Lot to answer your question...I'll give it a shot...
Food for thought before you go through bullet items.....this is nothing like the VMware Storage Appliance or openfiler or pick your SMB storage solution....if VSAN suits your needs and you decide to roll out VSAN, DON"T WING IT!!!!!.....you will fail miserably. At home do whatever you want but for work/business, treat VSAN as if you're deploying an EMC SAN....very serious, do your homework, check every component on HCL, account for licensing and licensing costs, understand components/how everything fits together/how it all works/do your capacity planning, etc, etc, etc.....I hope you get the point. If you want to be miserable with VSAN because transfer rates are too slow because your using 2.5 SATA drives you pulled from an old desktop, you'll waste an unbearable amount of time trying to get things up and running and in the end, the final product will be slow. VSAN is amazing, but only if to those who have taken the time to do it right.
*short/quick incomplete list
GOOD
- scalabe
- fast (if done right)
- upcoming vsan features are game changers (fault domains/possible metro-site clustered capability/max-mins raised)
- perfect for shows that do not have enterprise storage/money for enterprise storage/have lots of HDDs and SSDs lying around (always check HCL and drive specs)
- perfect if your budget will allow for the up front costs since you can scale out....expand as you can bring more money to the table
- built-in resilience
- baked right into the hypervisor
- built-in logic for balancing out resources
- supports migration of VMs across multiple vSAN clusters (as long as they are in same "vCenter" managed realm)
- supports SRM
- supports VDP
- support vCAC
- VSAN can use LACP along with network IO control
CAVEATS / BAD
- without licenses, you're dead in the water
- due to baked-in resilience, you lose some storage
- requires a minimum of 3 ESXi hosts for a SINGLE vsan datastore
- 2048 VMs HA protected max per cluster
- 75 VMs HA protected max per host
- if deploying multiple VSAN clusters, IGMP snooping querier must be configured for each cluster
