Want to deploy a cost-efficient high-performance VMware vSAN cluster? Read this Best Practices Guide.

IT organizations can no longer afford legacy storage architecture that limits their ability to scale cost-effectively. Intel hardware coupled with VMware software is an effective alternative for modernizing and future-proofing storage. 

VMware vSAN is a vSphere-native SDS solution that powers industry-leading hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions in the hybrid cloud. Intel and VMware have worked closely to develop reference architectures and best practices for deploying a vSAN platform that is optimized to run on technology from Intel, such as the latest generation of Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, Intel® Optane™ SSDs, and Intel® Optane™ persistent memory. The steps and recommendations in this best practices guide can help you build a storage platform that can keep up with current needs as well as scale into the future.

Intel Optane SSDs deliver excellent business value in the cache tier of vSAN deployments by offering high performance, low latency, low acquisition costs and footprint, and high reliability and availability.

This best practices guide enables organizations to get the most value out of their investment in Intel Optane SSDs by providing guidance for topics such as

• Memory and I/O layout
• Memory configurations
• BIOS settings
• Optimizations for reducing latency
• Cache and capacity tier considerations
• Suggestions for how to benchmark a vSAN cluster
• vSphere sizing recommendations
• Setting up a vSAN environment

The significant operational benefits continue to drive the consolidation of workloads on HCI/hybrid cloud platforms. And an increase in VM density continues to be the go-to option to control costs, energy use, and footprint. But as the number of VMs per cluster increases, so does the demand for I/O to the storage systems and network, requiring data center architects to rethink the components that they use in these HCI platforms. 

Using Intel Optane SSDs as cache tier devices, along with higher-performance capacity drives and a wider network bandwidth, enables a significant increase in the overall cluster I/O throughput. This makes the configuration more scalable and enables higher VM density, creating good opportunities for cost and footprint reduction. In addition, the higher write throughput of Intel Optane SSDs provides a higher level of predictability; in other words, it enables the vSAN system to sustain the I/O latency even when some of the VMs that share the cluster resources cause sudden variations in the I/O load. This facilitates the management of workloads with stricter service-level objectives.

As the size of the hosts used in the vSphere and vSAN clusters continues to increase, the cost of memory takes a larger portion of the total host cost. The use of Intel Optane persistent memory in Memory Mode creates significant opportunities to reduce infrastructure costs.

Using the recommendations contained in this best practices guide, you can create a vSAN storage environment that can scale as storage needs increase, while meeting today’s performance and operational efficiency requirements.