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jkoebrunner
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

"VSAN replacement of Virtual Storage Appliance..." and the price?!

Hi,

This discussion may be a little bit "off-topic" but very important.

Status-Quo: I am system architect for a company which builds safety relevant systems with special HA requirements.

Most of our projects are small to medium-sized Public Safety and Air Traffic Management institutions.

We have designed a "Pod" solution for all smaller projects, providing HA and virtualization for our applications based on the Virtual Storage Appliance (with Essentials Plus), specially there where a dedicated storage was not affordable.

The VSA is not a high-end, high-scalable solution but performs very well and satisfies the needs of smaller installations.

Unfortunately, the VSA will not be available anymore after 1st of may... this brings us in a complicate situation because we have no real alternative in the same price segment.

I have evaluated VSAN which was impressing. I would like to change to VSAN but the pricing compared to the VSA is ridiculous for small Essentials Plus installations.

For instance, if you have three servers (dual socket), the licensing for VSAN + Essentials Plus Kit would cost us about 12K for VSAN (6x Sockets / 1Y Support) and 3K for the Essentials Plus Kit, means overall 15K in Euros.

Compared to the 4K for Essentials Plus + VSA, this is ridiculous! Even if you can save money on disks (depends on disk and SSD types) and get more performance... its not a real VSA replacement option.

I would like to see a solution for small installations with the Essentials Plus Kit combined with VSAN, limited to three hosts.

In my opinion, VMware cannot set the VSA to "end of availability", define VSAN as the VSA replacement option but raise the price by ~5 times...

What is your opinion?

BR Johannes

Johannes Köbrunner IT Solutions Architect Virtualization, Network and Storage Systems Frequentis AG VTSP, VCP, VCAP-DCD
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16 Replies
jb238
Contributor
Contributor

Use only 1 CPU per host, this should save half the vSAN licenses.

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vm_dig_deep
Contributor
Contributor

Hello jkoebrunner,

I understand where you are coming from,however if you look at Comparing VMware VSA & VMware Virtual SAN | VMware vSphere Blog - VMware Blogs the target Audience for Virtual SAN is basically  Enterprise and Commercial.

Also,if you look from the usability persective,Virtual SAN is tested with different platforms of Hardware and different versions of Hardware and only then has been released to the General Public.

Having said that,with regards to the Pricing,there is a difference between VSA and Virtual SAN itself.However there is a surprise with regards to pricing in store for customers who want to move from VSA to Virtual SAN.

Please liaise with a Technical Account Manager to know more details on this.

Let me break the surprise for you. Please take a look at Save 20% on Upgrading vSphere Storage Appliance to Virtual SAN | United States

Thanks

Arvind

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jkoebrunner
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi,

thanks for you replies.

@vm_dig_deep: You are absolutely right: VSAN is more than VSA and it's not a real replacement, it's a new product with a new target group.

Nevertheless: Discontinuing VSA without a real replacement option is not the best move by VMware, especially within 2 months! We have to react now very fast to provide a new solution to our customers...

VSAN could be seen as a replacement if there was a bundle for three hosts for a special price.

The Minus 20% offer is nice but does not make it really affordable for small environments (see my price comparison above).

@jb238: Using only 1 CPU per server is also an idea which I am now working on... anyhow, I am loosing 50% CPU resources in a three node cluster.

Okay, I could design the system with 12 Core CPUs... but this means again that the price will go up dramatically (we use 6 Core Intel CPUs with a special pricing offer).

Johannes

Johannes Köbrunner IT Solutions Architect Virtualization, Network and Storage Systems Frequentis AG VTSP, VCP, VCAP-DCD
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MarcHuppert
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I have the same problem. Many of my customers would like to buy the VSA today and use it at the Branch Offices, but that is not possible.

Why not staying VSA alive for vSphere 5.x?

The support is still valid for customers who bought it before April 1st.

VCDX #181, VSP, VTSP, VCA, VCP-DCV(2+3+4+5+6+6.5+6.7+2019), VCP-DT, VCP-NV, VCAP(DCA4+5+DCD4+5), VCIX-NV, VCIX-DCV, VCI, vExpert, vEpxert NSX, vExpert VSAN and VCDX
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skx
Contributor
Contributor

I echo these thoughts.. VSA was a great option for small environments running 10-20 VM's on 2-3 hosts.

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firstpick
Contributor
Contributor

OKay, I just hope I don't get blacklisted for saying this, however first I have to say I would always choose VMware over another product if they have one. So since a vacuum is being created by removing VSA, might I suggest NexentaStor?

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vThinkBeyondVM
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

You may want to look at this :

VMware Virtual SAN Licensing and Pricing | Virten.net


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nebulight
Contributor
Contributor

I agree. I work for a small company with a single Hyper-V server on local storage and was looking into switching to vsphere with VSA. However with this new change the price REALLY jumps up and is hard to swallow for a smaller setup.

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JohnNicholson
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Couple thoughts on smaller setups.

$7500 for a 3 node VSAN cluster (single socket) isn't that bad.  Especially when you can strip the disk configuration to half as many spindles (no internal raid before mirroring).

If your doing this as a fully managed service where you own it and provide VM's for a customer you may qualify for VSPP which means you just pay per GB (a lot cheaper). 

Lastly there are a alternative VSA products.  Starwind makes a product that supports 2 nodes without needing a 3rd witness node if I recall.  HP has their offering but the LeftHand Code base while stable is a bit dated.

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JohnNicholson
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

In my experience anyone who balks at the $7500 for VSAN is someone who's going to be putting the thing in a Tier zero broom closet, and undermining the point of HA by using a single switch, or Linksys grade junk or something else silly that brings the entire uptime well below the 5 x 9's that your normally shooing for a with a shared nothing cluster.

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Anton_Kolomyeyt
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Take a look @ StarWind Virtual SAN offering. It runs native (part of hypervisor kernel) on Hyper-V and inside Windows / Hyper-V VM when installed on ESXi.

Unlike VMware VSAN it does not require 3 nodes (you don't really need even 3d physical host for witness just make sure you follow StarWind heartbeat network installation and configuration),

unlike VMware VSAN StarWind does not require any flash (it's optional) and it can feed shared storage to outside of a VMware cluster with iSCSI / NFS / SMB3 (VMware VSAN uses private volumes for VMs).

2-node unlimited capacity license is free so may worth giving it a try Smiley Happy

Good luck!

Anton

P.S. StarWind is *MY* company if you care Smiley Happy

--

Hi,

This discussion may be a little bit "off-topic" but very important.

Status-Quo: I am system architect for a company which builds safety relevant systems with special HA requirements.

Most of our projects are small to medium-sized Public Safety and Air Traffic Management institutions.

We have designed a "Pod" solution for all smaller projects, providing HA and virtualization for our applications based on the Virtual Storage Appliance (with Essentials Plus), specially there where a dedicated storage was not affordable.

The VSA is not a high-end, high-scalable solution but performs very well and satisfies the needs of smaller installations.

Unfortunately, the VSA will not be available anymore after 1st of may... this brings us in a complicate situation because we have no real alternative in the same price segment.

I have evaluated VSAN which was impressing. I would like to change to VSAN but the pricing compared to the VSA is ridiculous for small Essentials Plus installations.

For instance, if you have three servers (dual socket), the licensing for VSAN + Essentials Plus Kit would cost us about 12K for VSAN (6x Sockets / 1Y Support) and 3K for the Essentials Plus Kit, means overall 15K in Euros.

Compared to the 4K for Essentials Plus + VSA, this is ridiculous! Even if you can save money on disks (depends on disk and SSD types) and get more performance... its not a real VSA replacement option.

I would like to see a solution for small installations with the Essentials Plus Kit combined with VSAN, limited to three hosts.

In my opinion, VMware cannot set the VSA to "end of availability", define VSAN as the VSA replacement option but raise the price by ~5 times...

What is your opinion?

BR Johannes

Message was edited by: Anton Kolomyeytsev to indicate StarWind belongs to him 🙂

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depping
Leadership
Leadership

Anton Kolomyeytsev wrote:

Take a look @ StarWind Virtual SAN offering. It runs native (part of hypervisor kernel) on Hyper-V and inside Windows / Hyper-V VM when installed on ESXi.

Unlike VMware VSAN it does not require 3 nodes (you don't really need even 3d physical host for witness just make sure you follow StarWind heartbeat network installation and configuration),

unlike VMware VSAN StarWind does not require any flash (it's optional) and it can feed shared storage to outside of a VMware cluster with iSCSI / NFS / SMB3 (VMware VSAN uses private volumes for VMs).

2-node unlimited capacity license is free so may worth giving it a try Smiley Happy

It may have been worth calling out that you work for Starwind.

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Anton_Kolomyeyt
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

I don't work for it. I own the whole company and had started it under Rocket Division Software name 10+ years ago. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarWind_Software

However as what I'm offering to OP is FREE I don't see any problem in doing that. <PS> added to make everybody happy Smiley Happy

Anton

--

It may have been worth calling out that you work for Starwind.

Message was edited by: Anton Kolomyeytsev <PS> added.

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depping
Leadership
Leadership

Anton Kolomyeytsev wrote:

I don't work for it. I own the whole company and had started it under Rocket Division Software name 10+ years ago. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarWind_Software

However as what I'm offering to OP is FREE I don't see any problem in doing that. <PS> added to make everybody happy Smiley Happy

Anton

--

It may have been worth calling out that you work for Starwind.

Message was edited by: Anton Kolomyeytsev <PS> added.

That it great for you that you own the company, it is still common courtesy to disclaim who you work for or in this case if you own a company.

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Anton_Kolomyeyt
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

1) That information was already included in my profile (company, position etc)

2) I already had a conversation with a forum moderator and he seems to be fine with everything so far

3) I already re-edited my posts (just a common sense of wisdom) to put a direct indication


Is there anything else I can do for you? Maybe you'll do a favor in return and actually try to help to OP now with some valuable advice? Maybe some free product as VSA is EOL-ed and VSAN is too expensive for him?


Anton


P.S. Veel succes vandaag met Chili Smiley Happy


--

That it great for you that you own the company, it is still common courtesy to disclaim who you work for or in this case if you own a company.

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Ravi_V
Contributor
Contributor

I have heard similar thoughts from a number of customers. Unsure what the migration path for them would be.

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