VMware vSAN
The market-leading hyperconverged
infrastructure software1 and your
first step to hybrid cloud
Future-proof your data center with HCI
In today’s technology-driven landscape, digital goods and services drive the
modern business. Organizations across industries rely on IT to provide them with
the infrastructure needed to deliver these digital experiences, meet changing
demands, and maintain a competitive edge. As time-to-market expectations
accelerate and greater numbers of mission-critical applications move outside the
core data center, IT must evolve toward a cloud operating model to achieve the
speed, agility and cost advantages that business leaders desire.
The first step for many organizations is to adopt hyperconverged infrastructure,
extending the benefits of a cloud operational model to storage while optimizing
investments in existing tools and processes. HCI increases agility, future-proofs
infrastructure, and lowers storage costs.
The industry’s leading HCI software stack
HCI at a glance
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI)
converges compute, storage and storage
networking resources on industry-
standard x86 servers, and uses software
to abstract and pool cluster resources
with unified management software.
With HCI, you can increase business
agility with automation, reducing
the need for manual intervention for
common tasks, while eliminating silos
and accelerating decision-making. You
can also increase the performance of
business-critical applications because HCI
supports the latest storage technologies.
HCI future-proofs your infrastructure
investments. Providing a common
operational model for managing
compute and storage by abstracting
the underlying infrastructure, HCI can
extend beyond the core data center
to the edge and the public cloud. Its
capabilities make HCI the ideal platform
for managing traditional virtual machines
(VMs) and next-generation application
deployments.
Leveraging industry-standard x86 servers
for compute and storage, HCI reduces
costs by avoiding expensive, purpose-
built storage and storage networking
investments. As HCI scales linearly, your
organization can avoid large, upfront
purchases and scale incrementally as
additional resources are needed.
VMware’s industry-leading software stack includes:
VMware vSphere® for compute virtualization
VMware vSAN™ for storage integrated with vSphere
VMware vCenter® for virtual infrastructure management
VMware HCI is highly configurable and seamlessly integrates with:
VMware NSX® to provide secure network virtualization
VMware vRealize® Suite for optional advanced hybrid cloud
management capabilities
VMware vSAN brings the power of cloud to your storage with vSphere
integration for consistent application performance and high consolidation ratios.
Meet today’s business requirements with agile HCI that allows you to scale
flexibly with subscription licensing, simplify operations with highly automated
workflows and cloud services, accelerate time to market, and reduce costs.
Next-generation architecture designed for high-performing devices future-
proofs your data center and enables you to optimize performance without
compromising space efficiency. VMware HCI is cloud connected to support any
application or use case in a hybrid cloud architecture and speeds cloud adoption
with consistent infrastructure and operations with all the global hyperscalers,
including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Alibaba and Oracle.
Key features and capabilities
Flexible scaling – vSAN provides flexible scaling, with as few as 2 nodes (plus
witness) and up to 64 nodes in a cluster. Scale out by adding nodes to a cluster,
scale up by adding nodes to drives, or create storage-only clusters via VMware
HCI Mesh™ to disaggregate compute and storage resources. Scale compute and
storage independently and precisely to meet application needs and optimize
resource utilization across clusters.
Accelerated cloud native app development – With minimal effort, developers can
seamlessly consume storage by choosing a policy-driven storage class for their
pods and automatically mounting the volume. vSAN cloud native storage supports
all key storage API objects within Kubernetes, and powers both block-centric
and file-centric microservice-based applications. vSAN provides admins with a
comprehensive, single-UI view to manage storage used by containers across
multiple orchestrators.
Integrated file services – Easily provision a file share with a single workflow, and
use vSAN as a unified storage control plane for both block and file storage.
vSAN file services integrate Active Directory and support Kerberos network
authentication and the most common protocols. vSAN file services can be used
in two-node deployments and stretched cluster deployments.
Key benefits
Deliver a cloud operational model to
every IT environment
Scale rapidly and flexibly with growing
demands for containers, VM-based
workloads, and cloud native applications
Optimize performance without
compromising storage efficiency
Take advantage of a flexible subscription
model to purchase resources as your
business needs them
Achieve unified management and
operations across varying workloads
and storage tiers
Reduce IT costs through both CapEx
and OpEx savings
Learn more
Visit Tech Zone to take a technical deep
dive into vSAN.
Read customer stories to learn how
others are using vSAN.
Try vSAN online for free with VMware
Hands-on Labs.
Request a free vSAN Assessment for
your data center.
For more information or to purchase
VMware products, call 877-4-VMWARE
(outside North America, +1-650-427-
5000), visit vmware.com/products, or
search online for an authorized reseller.
Deduplication and compression – Software-based deduplication and compression
optimizes all-flash storage capacity, providing as much as 7x data reduction
with minimal CPU and memory overhead. vSAN offers the ability to turn on
compression for only those environments where space efficiency must be
balanced with performance requirements.
Powerful stateful services – The vSAN Data Persistence platform provides a
framework for modern stateful service providers to integrate cloud native
applications into the underlying virtual infrastructure leveraging the Kubernetes
operator method and the vSphere Pod Service™.
VM-centric policy-based management – vSAN is part of the larger VMware
Cloud Foundation™ stack that uniquely delivers consistent, VM-centric operations
through policy-based management. Within the vSAN Express Storage
Architecture™, per-VM policies increase flexibility of management, enabling
compression policies or customize data services on a per-VM basis.
For a complete list of vSAN features, see the features by version matrix.
vSAN Express Storage Architecture enhancements
In addition to all the benefits provided by vSAN, vSAN Express Storage
Architecture boasts additional enhancements to optimize next-generation
storage devices, including the following.
Performance without trade-off – Store data using RAID6 at the performance
of RAID1. Achieve up to 4x higher performance while maintaining the highest
levels of data protection and space efficiency.
Ready-for-anything resilience – By removing disk groups and advancing to a
storage pool construct, vSAN Express Storage Architecture reduces failure
domains and further improves availability.
Native data protection – Native snapshots within vSAN Express Storage
Architecture enable rapid data protection with up to 100x faster operations.
Seamlessly connect to third-party backup solutions via an API for an easy-to-
use experience to enhance data protection and backup management.
Lower storage costs with supreme resource and space efficiency – Optimized
compression methods deliver up to 4x better compression ratios and up
to 70 percent extra usable capacity, further improving space savings and
efficiency. A single-tier architecture enhances the overall efficiency of storage
as all storage devices contribute to capacity.
Resource-intensive workloads, such as mission-critical applications, database
workloads, OLTP, DevOps, and edge deployments, are ideal use cases for
vSAN Express Storage Architecture.
System requirements
Hardware host
1GB NIC; 10GB or larger
NIC recommended
SATA/SAS HBA or RAID controller
At least one flash caching device
and one persistent storage disk
(flash or HDD) for each capacity-
contributing node
Cluster size
Min. 2 hosts; max. 64 hosts
vSAN Ready Nodes
Available at vmware.com/resources/
compatibility.
Software
VMware vSphere 7.0
VMware vSphere with Operations
Management™ 6.1 (any edition)
VMware vCloud Suite® 6.0 (any
edition updated with 6.5)
VMware vCenter Server® 7.0
vSAN Express Storage Architecture
CPU: 32 cores or more
Memory: 512 GB or more
Networking: 25 GbE or higher
Capacity: 15 TB or higher
Devices: 4 or more NVMe TLC SSDs,
mixed-use (3 DWPD or higher)
vSAN Express Storage Architecture does
not require a separate caching device.
For more details, please refer to the
vSAN Hardware Compatibility guide