One of the most intresting topic from the last VMware Partner Exchange 2014 was definetaly Virtual SAN. There were pleny sessions about VSAN which will be part of VMwares SDDC Suite. I tried to collect all updates announced at PEX in this post.

Sessions at PEX

SDDC3210 – VSAN – Converged Storage Optimized for Virtual Environments

SDDC3221 – VSAN and the SDDC Suite: Integration and Interoperability

SDDC3384 – SDS – The Next Phase in the Evolution of Enterprise Storage

SDDC3444 – VSAN – Technical Best Practices

SDDC3445 – VSAN – Sizing and Use Cases

SDDC3521-BC – Software-Defined Storage & VSAN – Sales Boot Camp

VSAN GA

VMwares new Chief Technical Officer Ben Fathi stated that Virtual SAN will be available in Q1 2014. There is an VSAN Online Event on 6th of March 2014. The agenda includes product news, demonstration of key features and a surprise. It is likely that the release date of VSAN will be announced at or close to this event. Make sure to join this free event here.

VSAN Scale

The maximum cluster size has been increased to 16 hosts. Due to its design, VSAN scales linear with the number of nodes in a cluster. Internal benchmarks have reached close to one million IOPS in a 16 node VSAN cluster.

Beta Reach

More than 10,000 have registered for the VSAN public beta. The Beta is still open and can be joined here. VMware offers an exclusive 20% discount on Virtual SAN for Beta users.

Partner Ecosystem

Server platforms from HP, IBM, Dell and Cisco will be certified with Virtual SAN when it is released. There are also a lot of components that are supported by GA, including EMC, HGST, Intel, Fusion-io, LSI, Samsung Electronics, SanDisk and Seagate.