Vsan

I wanted to retire my Synology DS414slim, and switch completely to vSAN. Okay, no big deal. Many folks use vSAN in their lab. But I’d like to explain why I moved to vSAN and why this move failed. I think some of my thoughts are also applicable for customer environments.

So far, I used a Synology DS414slim with three Crucial M550 480 GB SSDs (RAID 5) as my main lab storage. The Synology was connected with two 1 GbE uplinks (LAG) to my  network, and each host was connected with 4x 1 GbE uplinks (single distributed vSwitch). The Synology was okay from the capacity perspective, but the performance was horrible. RAID 5, SSDs and NFS were not the best team, or to be precise, the  CPU of the Synology was the main bottleneck.

The whole story began with a tweet and a picture:

Spotted Marvin on VMware campus during a break this morning "first hyperconverged infrastructure appliance " pic.twitter.com/1iIPocjREX

— Fletcher Cocquyt (@Cocquyt) June 7, 2014

This picture  in combination with rumors about Project Mystic have motivated Christian Mohn to publish an interesting blog post. Today, two and a half months later, “Marvin” or project Mystic got its final name: EVO:RAIL.

What is EVO:RAIL?

Firstly, we have to learn a new acronym: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance (HCIA). EVO:RAIL will be exactly this: A HCIA. IMHO EVO:RAIL is VMwares try to jump on the fast moving hyper-converged train. EVO:RAIL combines different VMware products (vSphere Enterprise Plus, vCenter Server, Virtual SAN and vCenter Log Insight) along with EVO:RAIL deployment, configuration and management to a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance. Appliance? Yes, an appliance. A single stock keeping unit (SKU) including hardware, software and support. To be honest: VMware will no try to sell hardware. The hardware will be provided by partners (currently Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Inspur, NetOne and SuperMicro).