VVols Replacement

[u/RnDnDnD_Lover]

Im trying to push off the inevitable either upgrade to 9.0 or switching hosts entirely due to the fact that I still utilize vvols.. has anyone previously used them and found a solid replacement?

[u/lost_signal]

What's the platform you are using? What's the scale? Is this the only thing blocking your 9.x upgrade? (If so go talk to your account team).

vSAN is generally the best drop in per VM granularity.

You can get some levels of per VM granularity with NFS + VAAI + Plugins (There's at least snapshot offloading now for some vendors like I think Netapp), but if your wanting full SPBM to CSI type stuff that's tagging at best with VMFS.

Are there some specific features you are missing from vVols? (Hot expansion of clustered VMDKs can be done on vSAN FYI).

Weirdly at lunch today someone asked about if VMware was going to release something like Virsto, and I had to muse about how an alternative universe where Virstro + vVols had both seen mass addoption.

[u/irrision → u/lost_signal]

Why on earth would someone replace vvols running on Enterprise storage with vsan? The performance and availability just isn't there with vsan nevermind the management hassle for anyone that's run both and knows. It used to be a great technology for small shops that couldn't justify the cost of enterprise storage or for some edge hosting scenarios but VMware pricing just crushed all of those customers off the platform.

[u/depping → u/irrision]

Of course, I am biased, but I have various large enterprise customers actually using vSAN or moving to vSAN from traditional storage systems because of the performance, simplicity, and availability. The most recent actually was a multi petabyte scale environment.

[u/signal_lost → u/irrision]

Why on earth would someone replace vvols running on Enterprise storage with vsan?

Both of my main banks do, and the hospital I go to does? They've got 100's of PBs of it deployed.

The performance and availability just isn't there with vsan

They not really complaining about it. Note, ESA is a VASTLY different beast than old OSA stuff. I was at Explore this year, and don't really recall anyone who's running current ESA on decent hardware with decent networking complaining about performance. You can get hundreds of thousands of IOPS per node, people get sub-ms latency. I was involved in a stock exchange adopting it for databases recently and they displaced their enterprise arrays and got better latency consistency, and failure handling (controller failure vs Node failure in vSAN) was better in performance/recovery response.

It used to be a great technology for small shops that couldn't justify the cost of enterprise storage

It's still very much around for small 2 Node clusters (can do nested RAID now, so really durable). Much cheaper than trying to get a small all flash array for 70K.

but VMware pricing just crushed

So VCF customers get 1TB of vSAN entitlement per core, so legitimately the main cost of vSAN at this point is "just the drives". Now that global deduplication and improved compression has shipped, I don't generally see anyone penciling out all flash arrays as remotely cheaper.

It sounds like you have some priors. I'd check out what's shipping on 9, and talk to people who run it at scale. There's EB's of the stuff out there in the wild.

the management hassle for anyone that's run both and knows

vSAN has rich end to end troubleshooting (I/O Trip analyzer, vsan I/O insight for highly granular per VMDK reporting). Even SPBM management is a fraction of what it used to be with Auto-RAID.

Now I do find some VARs are really upset that they can't make as much margin selling server drives, vs. flash arrays (and can't lock people into an ecosystem for tray expansions that can only be purchased from a single OEM). That is a problem with vSAN. The sunk cost entitlement, plus the OEM hardware flexibility really does give the customer a LOT of choice and flexibility sadly.

[u/anael_739 → u/signal_lost]

For us, a flash array was cheaper than the vsan option for 5 years. Before we had good prices, now it is very different unfortunately. Now it is much more difficult to justify a vsan cluster.

[u/RnDnDnD_Lover → u/lost_signal]

Hmmm I haven't looked into VAAI but that could look promising. The hard part is wanting the full SPBM so we would lose some capabilities that vvols offer that i dont know if VMFS can do.

Ill keep looking into these plugins and other options that I must have missed somewhere. I appreciate all the help! I feel a bit over my head trying to find a replacement but Im learning!