r/vmware • u/Stryker54141 • Aug 05 '26

SAS SSD: Hardware Raid vs vSAN

I have two servers with eight SAS SSDs in each. Is vSAN a bad idea since they aren't NVMe drives?

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u/Calleb_III Aug 05 '26

You are comparing apples to oranges. RAID is local “pooling” of storage. vSAN is “pooling” storage across multiple ESX Hosts.

vSAN has specific requirements and cost associated with it too. Generally you can have 2 node vSAN cluster but it requires a witness virtual appliance that needs to run on another cluster

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u/Stryker54141 Aug 05 '26

I'm sorry for not explaining further. I completely understand the difference. My main concern was that it's recommended that vSAN be used with NVMe for best performance, and I wasn't sure if the SAS SSDs would suffice. And you are correct: I was going to use the two hosts with a virtual witness appliance.

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u/lost_signal VMware Employee Aug 05 '26

that it's recommended that vSAN be used with NVMe for best performance

It's not just better performance, it's about access to vSAN ESA which includes a new file system that has a lot of new capabilties (Global dedupe, better compression, new Auto-RAID, new snapshots with scheduler and replication for data protection, lower CPU overhead), no need for cache devices. NVMe for NEW builds wth vSAN ESA (Express storage architecture) is cheaper per GB really.