Series: High Capacity VSAN Nodes

Summary

I was recently asked for some help engineering high capacity VSAN nodes for a large storage solution which brought up some issues I thought would be interesting to share. By high capacity, I mean the customer was looking for 400TB with the ability to grow to a petabyte. I found that the standard building blocks didn’t make economic sense for the customer’s ratio of workloads to storage. As a result, we examined the available platforms for greater capacities per node.

The first thing I’d like to examine are the various density trade-offs that can be made in choosing a configuration.

Continue reading High Capacity VSAN Nodes Part 1

Summary

This is part 2 of a series of lessons learned and examples worked based on a 400+ TB VSAN solution I helped a partner engineer. I’m comparing high capacity VSAN nodes with standard configurations. This post will focus on calculating the IOPS required to de-stage writes from the caching layer, then examining the implications on hardware choices.

Continue reading High Capacity VSAN Nodes Part 2

Summary

This is part three in a series of posts discussing lessons I learned from helping a partner engineer a 400+ TB VSAN Solution. It turns out that high capacity VSAN nodes are a slightly different beast than the standard off-the-shelf solution. Part one discussed different density issues as related to disk configurations. Part two worked through a hypothetical 1TB/day, 365 day retention engineering solution. In part three, I’ll be continuing with that example and exploring possible models for purchasing and growing such a solution.

Continue reading High Capacity VSAN Nodes Part 3