vSphere Storage Appliance 1.0, Is It Really Necessary After All?
Comments (0) A week ago, one of the latest derived products from vSphere 5 catches my attention, the vSphere Storage Appliance v1.0. Basically, it’s a software SAN solution for ESX Shared Storage requirement. VMware vSphere Storage Appliance provides virtual shared storage volumes without the hardware.
VSA enables Different Key Features according to different vSphere Editions:
Essentials Plus, Standard
•High Availability
•vMotion
Enterprise
•Fault Tolerance
•Distributed Resource Scheduler
Enterprise Plus
•Storage vMotion
And it offers Storage Protection
RAID 1 (mirroring) protection across nodes
RAID 10 protection within each node
Licensing
vSphere Storage Appliance is licensed on a per-instance basis (like vCenter Server)
Each VSA instance supports up to 3 nodes. (ie, maximum expandability is 3 ESX Hosts)
At least two nodes needs to be part of a VSA deployment
Pros: There is only ONE, it doesn’t require you to purchase an expensive SAN in order to use vMotion/DRS.
Cons: Too Many!!! Read on…
1. The license fee is USD5,995 per-instance but 40% off if with vSphere Essentials Plus, again VMware wants all of you to purchase E+, a $$$ driven price structure thing created by its fleet of “genius” MBAs. If your company have the money to purchase VSA, then I am pretty sure a proper SAN won’t cost you an arm.
2. “Run vCenter Separate from VSA Cluster for best protection” Why’s that? These days the ultimate goal is to virtualized everything even for vCenter, it’s against the most fundamental rule of virtualization just like vRam asking you to purchase more servers with less ram installed on each host!
3. Have additional disk-space to enable RAID protection: VSA protects your data by mirroring data in multiple locations – this means your business data will require additional raw disk capacity. Good rule of thumb is to get 4x the server internal disk space you expect to use (You kidding me! RAID10, then split the rest for other node’s mirror, left you ONLY 1/4 of the original storage, this is again not enviornmental friendly); in VSA 1.0, disk capacity and nodes cannot be changed setup – feature is planned for future release.
3. Two VSA Hosts can support up to 25 VMs, Three VSA Hosts can support up to 35 VMs: This particularly renders VSA to Not Worth Spending the $$$, 3 nodes can only support 35 VMs max sounds unjustified for ROI.
4. Since it’s NFS based, you can’t use RDM or VAAI, this is bad news for those who run Exchange/SQL and looking for performance, but again, if you are after IOPS, then you got the $$$. Not to mention NFS is well known for its low performance over IP network comparing to block based such as FC or iSCSI and placing the same shared storage or SAN on ESX host will inevitably reduce the overall performance.
It seemed to me an immature rush to release product, use 400% more space is not a solution for Enterprise, it’s a big waste and a 2nd point against virtualization. It reminds me the software feature from NetApp’s Network Raid, it will use 2/3 of your storage for N+1 raid feature, well it worked, but it just doesn’t justify the cost after all.
Virtualization should save cost by fully utilizing Cpu/Ram/Space, but with the release of vSphere 5, it seemed to me the VMware is trying its best to discourage everyone by using vRam model as well as this VSA product. There is a hot debate on this topic on VMTN, 99.9% is against this “vmw screwed us“ new license change, and vmw’s official is hiding in the dark and afraid to response with a valid point.
No body want to purchase more servers with less ram on each host these days, these will use more power and absolutely non environmental friendly, now, we see VMware is becoming an anti-environmental friendly corporation.
Finally, VSA will use host CPU and local storage IOPS, and it’s not a model for future aggregate IOPS growth comparing to a real SAN, but after all, it’s just a temporary product for SMB, but why does VMware charge so much for it? In my own opinion, vSphere Storage Appliance 1.0 can be made obsolete and it’s uncessary as there are already Free Products from Microsoft iSCSI Target, Starwind and many similar products from Linux world for the purpose of Shared Storage for ESX.
PS. Just found out the free vSphere 5.0 ESXi version has the pathetic 8GB limit, now I finally understand why Monopoly is a bad thing, I shall start to look into Xen and Hyper-V seriously for my clients.
