C H E AT S H E E T I N T E R N A L U S E O N LY
VMware Virtual SAN 5.5 Beta
Radically Simple Shared Storage Designed for Virtual Machines
Product Overview
VMware Virtual SAN is a new software-defined storage tier
that extends the hypervisor to pool both compute and direct
attach storage. Virtual SAN clusters server disks and flash to
create radically simple, high performance, resilient shared
storage designed for virtual machines.
Radically simple storage designed for virtual machines
Significantly lower TCO than systems with comparable
performance
Start small with low upfront investment and grow as you go
with granular linear scaling of performance, capacity, and cost
Rapid storage provisioning and automated self-tuning
ongoing management
Backed by VMware support and all the major server OEMs
Single pane of glass management through VMware vSphere
vCenter
Virtual SAN clusters SSD and hard disks to create a shared storage management plane.
What is Software-Defined Storage?
Traditional storage technologies are complex, heterogeneous,
expensive, and lack integration, particularly at the application
level. New scale-out applications, exploding data growth, and
the proliferation of virtualization have further aggravated the
limitations of traditional storage technologies and caused
companies to consider new approaches to storage. As
applications are increasingly virtualized and as x86-baseed
servers have become more powerful, companies are realizing
that a server-side storage tier can dramatically simplify and
improve how they store data.
Software-defined storage introduces the concept of abstracting
and pooling resources at the hypervisor layer. With proximity to
compute and an unmated understanding of the virtual machine
topology, the hypervisor is an increasingly important and
powerful control point in intelligently making storage-related
decisions. With abstracted and pooled storage resources, a
virtual machine-centric approach to storage allows for a radically
simple, high performance and resilient shared storage solution
that is completely software-driven. This new approach is called
software-defined storage.
VMware Virtual SAN 5.5 Beta
Software-Defined Storage
VMware is proud to introduce the Beta of Virtual SAN 5.5, a
Virtual SAN software solution that gives enterprises agility,
control and performance at a significantly lower TCO cost. As a
key component of VMwares vision for the software-defined data
center, Virtual SAN provides a virtual machine-optimized SAN
solution based on x86-based server infrastructure. This solution
delivers on three key aspects of storage purely as software:
Policy-driven Control Plane - automated storage consumption
through virtual machine-centric policies for placement,
protection and performance
Virtualized Data Plane ability to abstract, pool and consume
storage capacity from a heterogeneous set of industry standard
infrastructure (DAS, SAN, NAS) as data stores and virtual
machine disks (VMDKs)
App-Centric Data Services - provision and management of
services such as replication, snapshots, clones, backup, caching,
etc. at the virtual machine level
Similar to server virtualization, software-defined storage abstracts,
pools and automates heterogeneous storage hardware resources
delivering a storage layer that delivers a similar set of customers
benefits as does the virtualized compute layer: efficiency, agility
and flexibility. Just like virtualization did for server infrastructure,
the promise of software-defined storage is to deliver a drastic
reduction in the cost and complexity of storage infrastructure.
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How does Virtual SAN work?
Virtual SAN is a new software-defined storage tier that extends
the hypervisor to pool both compute and direct attached storage.
By clustering server direct attached hard disk (HDD) and solid
state drives (SSD), Virtual SAN creates a distributed shared data
store designed and optimized for virtual machines. Virtual SAN
is built-in the vSphere kernel and implements a distributed
architecture that leverages SSDs for high performance read/
write caching and HDDs for cost-effective data persistence.
Virtual SAN is based on a highly available architecture with no
single point of failure. It can withstand failures at the disk, server
and network level with no data loss thanks to built-in redundancy
mechanisms that transparently store multiple copies of the data
across disks and hosts. Virtual SAN implements a policy-driven
approach to storage management that allows specifying storage
attributes such as capacity, performance, availability, etc. - in
the form of simple policies associated with individual virtual
machines or virtual disks. Storage is instantly provisioned and
automatically configured according to the assigned policies. Each
virtual machine maintains its unique policy regardless of its
physical location in the cluster. Virtual SAN dynamically self-
tunes and load balances to meet the policies of each individual
virtual machine adapting to ongoing workload condition changes.
Key Features and Capabilities
Built-in the vSphere kernel Virtual SAN is implemented
inside the vSphere kernel. This unique property of Virtual SAN
enables seamless integration with vSphere, best performance
and scalability.
Read/write I/O caching Virtual SAN minimizes storage latency
by accelerating read/write disk I/O traffic with built-in caching on
server side flash.
Built-in protection from failures Virtual SAN leverages
distributed RIAD and cache mirroring to ensure that data is
never lost in case of disk, host or network failures.
Non-disruptive capacity scalability Capacity of the Virtual
SAN data store can be easily and non-disruptively grown by
adding hosts to a cluster or disks to a host.
Virtual machine-centric policy-based management storage
requirements are associated to individual virtual machines or
virtual disk in the form of policy statements that Virtual SAN
automatically translates into system configurations to instantly
provision storage with the right SLAs.
VMware Virtual SAN 5.5 Beta
Self-tuning storage and dynamic storage load balancing
Virtual SAN automatically and non-disruptively maintains the
specified storage capacity, performance and availability levels for
each individual virtual machine. Virtual SAN interoperates with
vSphere DRS for end-to-end compute and storage balancing.
Integration with vSphere data services Virtual SAN leverages
vSphere Snapshots, vSphere Clones, vSphere Data Protection,
and vSphere Replication for data protection, backup, rapid
cloning and data transfer across clusters or sites for DR purposes
Integration with vSphere Web Client Virtual SAN is managed
from the vSphere Web Client for single pane of glass management
with vSphere
Broad hardware compatibility Virtual SAN is a hardware
agnostic solution that can be deployed on hardware of all
server OEMs
Interoperability with VMware View and VMware Site Recovery
Manager Virtual SAN can be deployed in conjunction with
VMware View in VDI environments and VMware vCenter Site
Recovery Manager in DR environments
Benefits
Radically Simple Storage Designed For Virtual Machines.
Virtual SAN makes it extremely easy to provision and manage
storage for virtual machines. It is architected and designed to
enable rapid provisioning of storage directly from vSphere Web
Client with few simple clicks. Virtual SAN is a self-tuning system
that automatically and non-disruptively optimizes itself to deliver
the right SLAs based on the requirements of each virtual machine.
Significantly lower TCO for comparable performance. Virtual
SAN drastically reduces storage capital and operational expenses
leveraging inexpensive server disks and flash, and standard
vSphere networking. This reduces power and cooling costs and
boosts operational efficiency via automation.
Low upfront investment and grow as you go. Unlike traditional
storage arrays, Virtual SAN does not require large upfront
investments to get started. A Virtual SAN data store can be
created with as few as three severs. In addition, Virtual SAN
allows users to grow storage performance and capacity more
granularly and predictably, in line with compute resource
Backed by VMware and with broad ecosystem support. Virtual
SAN is a software-only hardware agnostic solution that works
with server hardware from all major server OEMs and does not
rely on proprietary hardware.
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 VMware Virtual SAN 5.5 Beta

Go-to-Market/Sales Motion Qualification

VMware Virtual SAN is a new product with a sales motion that requires customer qualification. Below are details outlining potential
customers and use cases that apply to this product.

TO P I C ANSWER

Elevator Pitch Virtual SAN clusters server disks and flash to create radically simple, fast, resilient shared storage designed for
virtual machines at significantly lower TCO

Target Customer Commercial and enterprise

Target Buyer Directors of IT who span storage and server decisions

Influencer: VI Administrator
Internal Stakeholder: Storage Administrator

Use Cases VDI

Testing/development and tiers 2 and 3
Disaster recovery
ROBO sites

Indicators of Buying The ideal Virtual SAN customer

Propensity Requires additional storage capacity or has an upcoming hardware refresh for storage and/or servers
Recognizes storage agility and cost as a huge pain, possibly causing leakage to Amazon
Tends to be early adopter of new technologies & architectures
Is evaluating new storage products like Nutanix, Simplivity, Tintri, Coraid, Nimble etc.

Benefits Radically simple storage, architected for virtual machines managed directly from vCenter
Lowers storage cost by approximately 50% lower TCO.
Integrated in vSphere and vCenter
Read/write SSD caching with intelligent data placement for high performance
Virtual machine-centric policy based management for radically simpler provisioning and administration

Objection Handling
When talking to customers about VMware Virtual SAN, there are common misconceptions and objections that customers will likely
make. Below are a couple objections we often hear along with suggested responses.

OBJECTION RESPONSE

We already invested in a traditional SAN. Deploy Virtual SAN for your additional capacity requirements while
using traditional SAN for high-end production workloads.

Our architectural direction is diskless blades and stateless ESXi. Scale-out storage & compute is the architecture chosen by large Web
2.0 companies like Google & Facebook.

What about the support model? The support model for Virtual SAN is just like your current vSphere and
server support model.

Is this unproven storage technology from a hypervisor company? Virtual SAN is simply extending vSphere concepts to other
components.

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 VMware Virtual SAN 5.5 Beta

Pricing and Packaging

VMware Virtual SAN will be sold as a standalone product despite being integrated into vSphere. Virtual SAN must be turned on
with a license key and is not bundled into any VMware suites. Pricing will be announced with the general availability (GA) of the
product in H12104.

More Information
For more information about Virtual SAN, please visit our Virtual SAN Beta page at www.vsanbeta.com or the VSAN product page at
www.vmware.com.

VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com
Copyright 2013 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed
at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be
trademarks of their respective companies. Item No: VMW5258-CHS-vSAN-5.5-USLET-102 09/13