Are there Big Vsan 6.0 clusters, is Vsan capable?

[pauldaytona]

When I read stories about Vsan, also on the VMware own site, I see mostly VDI or smaller deployments. We did some testing with 6.0. The performance looks like we could live with it.

Are there sites having Vsan deployed in production for critical data large scale?

I"m wondering if a vsan cluster as primary storage with 250Tb usable storage and growing in the next years to double of that would be a good case for Vsan? Or is this growing to big, and should we look at other storage?

We have 30 hosts in the cluster running a 300 vm's. The cluster is business critical.

[zdickinson]

I'm not sure if anyone is doing vSAN at that scale for business critical apps.  IMHO, vSAN is capable; but are the resources around it capable?  By resources I mean human and technical.  You need every skill in the tool box to do vSAN, networking, storage, virtualization, server, etc...  If the entire team is committed to software and commodity hardware as a base for infrastructure, go for it.

I might look at some of the EVO Rail solutions as a good balance between vSAN and traditional architecture.  I like the Dell and EMC implementations.

Thank you, Zach.

[ramakrishnak]

To add to what Zack said.

Yes, VSAN is capable of large capacity and performance

Current supported max limits are well beyond the no. you are looking for...

from storage point of view we support 64 vsan hosts per cluster each with 5 diskgroups and 7 HDDs per diskgroup.

am also interested to see, if large scale deployments exists today and how are they faring..

Thanks,

[williambishop]

Mission critical...I would be hesitant. Ver. 6 (really ver. 2) is substantially better than v 1, no doubt..but I personally would want something with a bit more miles under it's belt than VSAN for mission or business critical. I'm looking at it for a DR site, and then it will house my tier 2 apps, but for my "have to be up 24/7/365" applications? Not yet. There are other hyperconverged systems out there with more age and experience on them, it's not vsan vs. traditional arrays only.

[continuum]

At the moment I would use VSAN only for VMs that you regard as disposable.
From a recovery point of view VSAN is still a nightmare - problems that can be fixed easily in a normal vSphere environment require a much higher skill-level of the admins in VSAN - if they are fixable at all.

[zdickinson]

I would agree with this.  The skill set to admin a vSAN setup is much larger than a traditional vSphere deployment.  Thank you, Zach.

[jkoebrunner]

Hey,

I just want to share our experience with VSAN 1.0 so far - we have deployed about 15x 3-host VSAN clusters:

We use VSAN as the storage solution for our internally designed hyper-converged All-in-One IT platform.

We run mission-critical, realtime servers on this platform and had no issues up to now.

Performance, stability and usability is equal compared to dedicated storage solutions.

Next step will be to update to vSphere 6 and VSAN 6, where management has improved.

The only downside I see for now is the analysis of VSAN performance which is not integrated into vCenter yet (or is it with 6.0?).

Currently we use Veeam One for this.