What is VMware vSAN ?

SAN is a storage solution from VMware, released as a beta version back in 2013, made generally available to the public in March 2014, and reached version 6.7 in October 2018. vSAN is fully integrated with vSphere. It is an object-based storage system and a platform for Virtual Machine Storage Policies that aims to simplify Virtual Machine storage placement decisions for vSphere administrators. It fully supports and is integrated with core vSphere features such as vSphere High Availability (HA), vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and vMotion.

VMware vSAN extends the hypervisor to pool and abstract server-based storage resources, much the way vSphere pools and abstracts compute resources. It is designed to be much simpler and more cost-effective than traditional external storage arrays. Users of vSphere should be able to learn vSAN and become productive quickly.

vSAN is fully integrated with vSphere, and supports almost all popular vSphere functionality: DRS, HA, vMotion and more. vSAN is also integrated with the vRealize suite.

Key points :

• Software-defined storage, fully integrated with vSphere
• Uses internal server components to create a shared storage pool across a single cluster
• Uses storage policies to provide per-VM storage services

Technical characteristics:

• Highly-resilient scale-out storage cluster, dynamically expandable and reconfigurable
• Very resource efficient: more performance, more consolidation
• Hybrid configurations use flash as cache, magnetic disks for capacity
• All-flash configurations use flash for both cache and capacity
• Scales to 62TB VMDKs, 64 nodes, 35 capacity devices per node, 200 VMs per node.
• Up to 7m read-only 4K IOPS in a single 64-node clusters (that's a lot!)

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!