Setup Guide

Introduction to VMware vSAN
VMware vSAN is a hyper-converged, software defined storage platform that is completely integrated with VMware vSphere.
vSAN aggregates locally attached disks from the hosts participating in the vSphere cluster, creating a distributed shared vSAN
datastore. vSAN is the first policy driven storage solution from VMware that is designed for simplifying storage provisioning and
management in vSphere environments. To achieve fault tolerance and performance, the virtual machines that are deployed on a
vSAN datastore use VM level storage policies. For more information about vSAN, see VMware vSAN product page.
VMware vSAN provides a two tier architecture consisting of a caching tier and a capacity tier. VMware provides two different
configuration options for vSAN—All-Flash and Hybrid. The All-Flash configuration uses flash devices for both the cache layer
and the capacity layer. The Hybrid configuration uses flash devices in cache layer for optimal performance and magnetic disks to
increase the capacity and persistent data storage.
You can build a vSAN cluster by using one of the following options:
● Select from the list of Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes
● Build your own based on certified components
vSAN provides various features such as storage policy-based management, encryption for data-at-rest, stretched clusters, and
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Figure 1. vSAN high-level architecture
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Introduction to VMware vSAN 5