6.0

Each virtual machine maintains its policy regardless of its physical location in the cluster. If the policy
becomes noncompliant because of a host, disk, or network failure, or workload changes, Virtual SAN
reconfigures the data of the affected virtual machines and load-balances to meet the policies of each virtual
machine.
While supporting VMware features that require shared storage, such as HA, vMotion, and DRS, Virtual
SAN eliminates the need for an external shared storage infrastructure and simplifies storage configuration
and virtual machine provisioning activities.
Virtual SAN Workflow in View
1 Use vCenter Server 5.5 Update 1 or a later release to enable Virtual SAN. For more information, see the
vSphere Storage document.
2 When creating a desktop pool in View Administrator, under Storage Policy Management, select Use
vSphere Virtual SAN, and select the Virtual SAN datastore to use.
After you select Use vSphere Virtual SAN, only Virtual SAN datastores are displayed.
Default storage policy profiles are created according to the options you choose. For example, if you
create a linked-clone, floating desktop pool, a replica disk profile and an operating system disk profile
are automatically created. If you create a linked-clone, persistent desktop pool, a replica disk profile
and a persistent disk profile are created. For all desktop pools, a profile is created for virtual machine
files.
3 To move existing View Composer desktop pools from another type of datastore to a Virtual SAN
datastore, in View Administrator, edit the pool to deselect the old datastore and select the Virtual SAN
datastore instead, and use the Rebalance command .
4 (Optional) Use vCenter Server to modify the parameters of the storage policy profiles, which include
things like the number of failures to tolerate and the amount of SSD read cache to reserve.
The names of the policies are OS_DISK (for operating system files), PERSISTENT_DISK (for user data
files), REPLICA_DISK (for replicas), and VM_HOME (for virtual machine files such as .vmx and .vmsn
files). Changes to the policy are propagated to newly created virtual machines and to all existing virtual
machines in the desktop pool.
5 Use vCenter Server to monitor the Virtual SAN cluster and the disks that participate in the datastore.
For more information, see the vSphere Storage document and the vSphere Monitoring and Performance
documentation.
6 (Optional) For View Composer linked-clone desktop pools, use the Refresh and Recompose commands
as you normally would.
Requirements and Limitations
The Virtual SAN feature has the following limitations when used in a View deployment:
n
This release does not support using the View space-efficient disk format feature, which reclaims disk
space by wiping and shrinking disks.
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Virtual SAN does not support the View Composer Array Integration (VAAI) feature because Virtual
SAN does not use NAS devices.
NOTE Virtual SAN is compatible with the View Storage Accelerator feature. Virtual SAN provides a
caching layer on SSD disks, and the View Storage Accelerator feature provides a content-based cache that
reduces IOPS and improves performance during boot storms.
The Virtual SAN feature has the following requirements:
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vSphere 5.5 Update 1 or a later release.
Chapter 15 Reducing and Managing Storage Requirements
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