VSAN Design, Ready Nodes and Price.

[jgover]

Hi,

I am breaking down a budget costs of SAN-vs-VSAN for remote offices and larger offices. From the design it recommends 4 hosts. The VMware VSAN calculator does not consider VMs that require larger disks and or compute. Some VMs have 1TB vmdks in that environment.

http://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/products/vsan/vsan-design-and-sizin...

https://vsantco.vmware.com/vsan/SI/SIEV

I need a 6TB usable VSAN to host 12 VMs for small remote offices. The VSAN calculator pricing for the Ready Nodes does not seem to jive either in the pricing persistent and caching disks per Ready Node.-see attached. It states SDD and HDD are including in the price.

Is the price $20266 or $29198 or more?

At first glance I do not think VSAN will be affordable vs SAN for small offices.

-  VSAN 20266x4=$81064 ( I am assuming VSAN Ready Nodes includes VMware licensing costs.

- EMC SAN 7.5 TB ($14292) plus 3 Hosts $5557 = $30963

-- plus vCenter 7494 and vSphere Standard 3954

Total =$42411

If my calculations are correct that is impossible to present to Finance.

I looked at the ROBO VSAN but unclear about the witness appliance and reliability. Pricing as well is 20266x2=$40532

Thoughts....am I correct in my investigation?

Thanks

Message was edited by: DRUMDUDESAN Updated the Costs per Host from 3000-5557.

[zdickinson]

Good afternoon, your number for vSAN do seem high.  I'm going off of this from July 18th, 2016  https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/pdf/vi_vsan_rn_guide.pdf

First your question about ROBO.  It is reliable.  You have two hosts at the remote and then a witness appliance back at your main location.  If the connection to the main location goes down or the witness fails, no problem.  Your two host still have quorum.  If a host fails, no problem.  Your witness and working host have quorum.  You would be in trouble if a host failed and you lost connectivity back to your main location.  Or if both hosts failed obviously.

Most vSAN ready nodes do not include the vMware licensing.  I would expect to spend about $30k for each remote office.  You might have to steer clear of the vSAN ready nodes and they don't seem to have a good option for a ROBO config that has 7 TB of VMDKs.  I think the idea of ROBO is to have much less data than that.  Just make sure your individual components are on the HCL.

Have you looked into vXRAIL from EMC?  That starts small and scales really well.

Thank you, Zach.

[JohnNicholsonVM]

If your doing true Robo, buy the ROBO packs (pay for ~25VM's and I think list is ~$500 a VM that way).

Note 2 Node != ROBO. ROBO is a license, 2 node is a configuration. You could use ROBO licensing and have 3 hosts at a site (your just paying per VM at that point).

You could also buy VSAN standard and deploy a 2 node cluster with it.

I would also request to be routed to a VSAN specialist on the sales team who can help you get the right license, server configs etc picked out.  I suspect the prices on that tool are a bit out of date, or use list prices (not discounted).