Setup Guide
Introduction to VMware vSAN
VMware vSAN is a hyper-converged, software dened 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 rst 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 dierent conguration
options for vSAN—All-Flash and Hybrid. The All-Flash conguration uses ash devices for both the cache layer and the capacity layer. The
Hybrid conguration uses ash 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 certied components
vSAN provides various features such as storage policy-based management, encryption for data-at-rest, stretched clusters, and checksum.
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Introduction to VMware vSAN 5