November 20169 in a growing storage environment, including:· Higher-performance storage for VMware virtual machines· Storage elasticitythe ability to grow or shrink as needed· 100 percent access to storage resources for all VMs, with zero disruption· Greater ability to scale storage requirements and minimize large upfront investmentsreducing capex in the data center· Simpler, easier management of storagereducing opex for ITVMware VSAN is a widely val-idated solution for leveraging VMs to establish a software-defined in-frastructure, but is not built to man-age or virtualize the storage resourc-es used by file servers, creating the need for a file-service solution. File services would allow the solution to be extensible to additional use cases, such as virtual desktops, pre-produc-tion, test and development environ-ments, and branch or remote offices; and would streamline management of the entire storage ecosystemunder `a single pane of management', as the saying goes.Traditional vendors can meet this need with external storage arrays that drive up costs and limit flexibility, but in order to harness the full poten-tial of VMware VSAN, users should consider a software-defined file- services solution. It's possible to provide such a solutionessentially by adding NFS and SMB access on top of the ex-isting VSAN to complete the soft-ware hyper-convergence model. We saw that VMware Virtual SAN rep-resented a significant step forward in creating a `hyper-converged' in-frastructure, addressing the need for ever-closer integration of the compute and storage layers within the data center. But, we also recog-nized that including NFS and SMB would be necessary to realize the ul-timate vision of a software-defined data center.The benefits of adding file ser-vices to VSAN were immediately evident, including the optimization of storage capacity using inline com-pression and de-duplication, perfor-mance and health monitoring, ability to take volume-level snapshots, and backup capabilities for DR scenari-os. In addition, this approach could ensure proper IO path-handling and improve VSAN IO performance sig-nificantly, an area where SANs typ-ically do not perform well. This ap-proach also enables administrators to create storage profiles for different file systems to better align them with the needs of the business or organization.Being able to do all of this pro-grammatically reduces overhead and allows organizations to increase stor-age efficiency, while avoiding the ex-pense of adding more NAS storage. This kind of solution is particularly ap-pealing in environments with branch offices, allowing seamless provision-ing and management storage for file services at smaller locations, without deploying a separate NAS appliance, complimentary to the management ca-pabilities of VMware Virtual SAN.In conclusion, implementing VMware VSAN is an important step in virtualizing your current storage environment and leveraging the many benefits that come with building a VMware ecosystem, but without a software-defined file-service solution, you're effectively limiting the extensibility, scalability and ultimately, the performance of your storage environment--not to mention, missing an opportunity to ease your own management responsibilities. But, if you choose to integrate an SDS file-services solution, you can lead the charge toward a software-defined data center and a software-defined everything world.
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