vSphere Storage Appliance

Hello all, for a 2 node ESXi cluster, what's the best virtual SAN product out there?  We were considering VMWare's Virtual SAN but there is a mininum of 3 hosts required.  This is a small deployment as services are running out of a colocation facility.  The hosts will be ESXi 5.5 running on HP hardware.  Thanks.  

See my posting HP StoreVirtual VSA - automating iSCSI LUN rescan after VSA VM powers up

Hi, Well its actually a tricky question to answer as there are a few solutions out there that are focusing a different markets.

StorMagic, where I'm from, do a 2 server solution called SvSAN which is designed for multi-site environments and essentially centralizes that 3rd server or Neutral Storage Host (NSH) to your datacenter. You can then have a single (or multiple if preferred) NSH acting as the witness to all of your sites thus reducing hardware requirement by 33%. You can do it with just 2 servers and no NSH at all but that is not advised as you could end up with a split brain scenario in the event of a failure.

ESG recently did a lab review on it if your interested in having a look: http://www.stormagic.com/whitepapers/esg_lab_report.php

There are some great Virtual SAN solutions out there and this may not fit what you're looking to do but when it comes to 2 server and multi-site environments, we consider them non competitive.

Hope the info helps

Steve