vSAN Cost-Effective Architecture (For Desktops, almost there for servers)

So my esteemed colleague, Andrew Harding, brought this to my attention and the idea has kind of blossomed.  I thought it was rather clever approach to implementing VSAN in a cost effective manner.

The current line of thinking w/ VSAN is that you buy each host w/ the exact same disk configuration. In this way, with each host purchase, you not only get capacity, but you get additional I/O and CPU/Memory performance.
Disclaimer: Mac Mini's are completely unsupported by VMware, this is for illustration purposes only.
There are a couple problems w/ this model:
  1. Additional vSphere license cost
  2. Additional VSAN license cost
  3. Additional Hardware SSD/Disk cost
Being that VSAN does NOT attempt to keep VM storage data local to a host, you can augment your VSAN cluster w/ simple compute hosts that have no storage.  Meaning, if you don't have storage capacity or I/O performance problems, you can simply add another host that does not participate in the VSAN for additional CPU/RAM capacity.
Disclaimer: Mac Mini's are completely unsupported by VMware, this is for illustration purposes only.
Unfortunately, you can only circumvent the additional SSD/Disk costs.  You still need to purchase the vSphere and VSAN license.  If you ever need additional storage capacity and/or I/O performance you can simply slot in SSD's/Disks into those compute-only nodes at a later date.  It would be much nicer if you could circumvent vSAN licensing for those compute-only nodes while they do not provide storage.

However, in the VMware Horizon suite model, this type of architecture can play in your favor as VSAN is included and based upon a concurrent user model.  In this way you actually circumvent licensing completely, assuming you have enough concurrent users, and only need CPU/RAM/Storage.

I was happy to see that VSAN for the Horizon suite now includes all-flash VSAN now and that it is not a separate cost.  Unfortunately, VMware is still treating VSAN like they did vMotion back in the day.  You want All-Flash VSAN for servers?  That's extra.  Stretched VSAN Cluster?  Well, that's included when you buy all-flash.  Can you buy it separately?  No.  Ugh.  I'm going back to my previous stance, "All-Flash" should be included in the base license.  It feels stupid otherwise.  Features like "Dedupe", "Erasure-Coding", and "Stretch Cluster" should be and make sense as add-ons as they don't necessarily require specific hardware.  At least, not that I'm aware of yet.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NSX-T: vCenter and NSX-T Inventory out of Sync (Hosts in vSphere not showing up in NSX-T)

Image
Summary: NSX-T loses synch w/ vCenter inventory, but statuses don't appear to show an issue.  Basically, you add a host to a vCenter cluster, NSX-T bits should start to automatically installing on new host.  Assuming you've created a Transport Node Profile and associated w/ the cluster.  The problem is that NSX-T doesn't see the new host and its link to the compute manager (vCenter) looks fine. Looks fine, Y U NO WORK!? So what's going on here?  This appears to affect NSX-T 2.5 and 2.5.1.  Cause is unknown. Workaround: Restart the cm-inventory service on each NSX-T mgmt/controller node using API or CLI. Details: If you were to query the status of the cm-inventory via API or CLI, you could query all 3 manager/controller nodes and get a status of running.  Even if the primary node associated w/ the VIP, if configured, is not necessarily in charge of inventory.  So you could restart the cm-inventory service till you are blue in the face and get nowhere be
Read more

MacOS: AnyConnect VPN client was unable to successfully verify the IP forwarding table modifications.

Image
The VPN client was unable to successfully verify the IP forwarding table modification.  A VPN connection will not be established. Summary: I started running into issue utilizing Cisco AnyConnect on my Mac basically complaining about not able to overwrite IP forwarding tables.  This was on 4.6.x.  Since my VPN endpoints were not providing me w/ an updated client and w/ no access to Cisco Anyconnect downloads, my only option was to try openconnect.  It was totally worth it, here is why and how to set it up. PreReqs: Homebrew Installing OpenConnect: Launch MacOS Terminal brew install openconnect Getting VPN IP's/DNS Endpoints from AnyConnect: The information is typically located in your profile xml files located here: /opt/cisco/anyconnect/profile/somethingsomething.xml In the xml file, you are looking for "<HostAddress>typicallyaDNSName.com</HostAddress>" entry.  These are your VPN endpoints that you would need to pass to openconnect. Using
Read more

vCenter: Cluster Skip Quickstart Workflow via API

Image
Summary: Basically, whenever you reset vCenter, you might end up w/ a warning on a cluster running vSAN that's just annoying.  To circumvent, this from alerting, you need to disable quickstart.  Easy enough via UI, but API is a little weird here. Details: For one, code capture doesn't seem to understand this.  So no help there unfortunately.  Secondly, nothing named "quickstart" is in the API, so made this somewhat annoying to try and find.  Seems like someone had this question on the VMware communities forum 2 years ago w/ no answer.   Someone asked me internally, so I had to dig into it. Basically, two things: You can create a cluster w/ quick start disabled from the get go by passing a false boolean to a parameter named: "InHciWorkflow" via API/PowerCLI call Secondly, to "skip QuickStart" on an already created cluster, you can call a method called: "AbandonHciWorkflow" So yeah, you can see how "quickstart" and "HCIWorkfl
Read more