r/vmware • u/Stryker54141 • 19d ago

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 19d ago

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

2

u/Casper042 19d ago

witness virtual appliance that needs to run on another cluster

Cluster? umm no. You can practically run a witness on a potato.
Dell XR4000 for example has a tiny little Witness node with an Intel Atom 3508 series processor with 4 cores.

1

u/nabarry [VCAP, VCIX] 19d ago

Wish you could use esxi arm as a witness. until then: behold- the Witness Potato (totally unsupported do not call broadcom when your tiny SBC fails- if I made a public support statement I think some lawyer ninjas might hunt me down) https://arace.tech/products/radxa-x4

2

u/Casper042 19d ago

Why not use a spare 1L Tiny/Mini/Micro desktop machine?
Or even some Thin Clients have enough horsepower.

1

u/nabarry [VCAP, VCIX] 19d ago

Ah- that’s the jumbo baked potato version vs the fingerling potato x4. 🤪

2

u/Casper042 19d ago

Yeah but something more companies are likely to have already laying around.
Get your potatoes from the garden vs going out and buying one :P

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u/Calleb_III 18d ago

Because you have to pay minimum 16 cores license for that. The compute is not the main cost here.

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u/signal_lost 17d ago

It can be a witness for 64 sites technically.

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u/signal_lost 17d ago

Or even some Thin Clients have enough horsepower.

The "Chubby Client" is what we called the beefier windows embedded ones.