Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN) : Administrator's Guide to VMware Virtual SAN

Plan, implement, and manage VMware’s radically simple, enterprise-class software-defined storage platform

VMware’s Virtual SAN has rapidly proven itself in environments ranging from hospitals to oil rigs to e-commerce platforms. Along the way, it has matured to offer unsurpassed features for data integrity, availability, and space efficiency. Virtual SAN 6.x makes all-flash storage practical for even more use cases, while radically simplifying IT operations and supporting the transition to hyper-converged infrastructures (HCI). Now, the authors of Essential Virtual SAN (VSAN) have thoroughly updated their definitive guide to this transformative technology. Writing for vSphere administrators, architects, and consultants, Cormac Hogan and Duncan Epping explain what Virtual SAN is, how it has evolved, what it now offers, and how to gain maximum value from it.

Hogan and Epping draw on unsurpassed experience shaping Virtual SAN and helping VMware customers deploy it. They offer expert insight into preparation, installation, configuration, policies, provisioning, clusters, and more. You’ll also find practical guidance for using its new Health and Performance Services to gain end-to-end visibility into infrastructure and resource consumption. Both an up-to-the-minute reference and hands-on tutorial, Essential Virtual SAN, Second Edition uses realistic examples to demonstrate the immense power of Virtual SAN 6.x. You’ll learn all you need to successfully plan and deploy the newest versions, and operate them smoothly and efficiently.

COVERAGE INCLUDES:

• Understanding the goals and concepts of Software-Defined Storage and Virtual SAN
• Meeting updated requirements for safe Virtual SAN 6.x implementation
• Architecting, installing, and configuring Virtual SAN for your unique environment
• Simplifying deployment with VM storage policies and provisioning
• Controlling availability, performance, and reliability
• Efficiently managing and maintaining Virtual SAN
• Providing resiliency and scale-out storage functionality
• Designing and sizing clusters (with examples)
• Using stretched clusters to address rigorous downtime requirements
• Applying valuable new features such as deduplication, compression, checksums, and encryption
• Using Health and Performance Services to troubleshoot hardware, configurations, and performance

Cormac Hogan is a Senior Staff Engineer in the Office of the CTO in the Storage and Availability business unit at VMware. Cormac was one of the first VMware employees at the EMEA headquarters in Cork, Ireland, back in 2005, and has previously held roles in VMware’s Technical Marketing, Integration Engineering and Support organizations. Cormac has written a number of storage-related white papers and has given numerous presentations on storage best practices and new features. Cormac is the owner of CormacHogan.com, a blog site dedicated to storage and virtualization.

He can be followed on twitter @CormacJHogan.

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist working for VMware in the Office of CTO of the Storage and Availability business unit. Duncan is responsible for ensuring VMware’s future innovations align with essential customer needs, translating customer problems to opportunities, and function as the global lead evangelist for Storage and Availability. Duncan specializes in Software Defined Storage, hyper-converged infrastructures and business continuity/disaster recovery solutions. He has four patents pending and one granted on the topic of availability, storage and resource management. Duncan is the author/owner of VMware Virtualization blog Yellow-Bricks.com and has various books on the topic of VMware including the “vSphere Clustering Deepdive” series.

He can be followed on twitter @DuncanYB.