Comparing FA to vSAN for VCF Workload Domains

Executive Summary 

Pure Storage can help enterprises and service providers exceed SLAs and extend the capabilities of the VCF / vSphere deployments in the following key areas:

1. Optimize data center resources. Reduce the infrastructure spend for compute & storage and eliminate hardware-defined silos.
2. Provide storage fabric flexibility. Investment protection by enabling VCF on fibre channel fabrics, non-disruptive migration between storageprotocols (i.e. FC & iSCSI), and a future proof architecture that supports next-gen storage protocols (i.e. NVMe-oF & vVols).
3. Simply and scale operations. Remove the need for mass data evacuations, data re-hydrations, and data reconstructions that occur with server maintenance, hardware expansions and refresh and server failures.
4. Automate and protect the infrastructure. Increase the availability, scale, performance and business continuity of a a VCF deployment through robust integrations.

Pure has achieved a Satmetrix certified NPS score of 86.6 (top 1% of B2B CSAT) and has been identified as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Solid State Array for 5 years. Collectively these data points help communicate why Pure Storage FlashArray and VMware integrations provide the ideal foundation for extending the capabilities of VCF deployments.

VCF Storage Options

VCF deployments introduce the concept of domains; this is the physical assignment of hardware to support a set of virtualized applications and workloads.

•       The Management domain. This supports all VMware management tools including SDDC Manager VM, a vCenter VM for each workload domain, NSX VMs, vROPs VMs, vRNI VMs, HCX Manager VMs, etc. As of VCF 4.0 the management cluster must reside on vSAN.

•       Workload Domains. These support VMs and containers and may reside on either vSAN or 3^rd party storage (which must be supported by vSphere). Workload domain storage types are classified as either Principal or Secondary. Both provide identical management capabilities within SDDC Manager; however, the former can be provisioned within SDDC Mgr and later must be manual provisioned and imported into SDDC Mgr. VMware has a roadmap for promoting protocols from secondary to principal so this document may be out of date when it comes to this classification.

This document is explicitly focused on presenting the capabilities of an on-prem VCF deployment based on vSphere 6.7 and VCF 3.9 with a FlashArray running Purity OE 5.3 and vSAN 6.7.

The data referenced in the following pages was sourced from the following sources:

https://storagehub.vmware.com/export...nical-overview

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vS...otingguide.pdf https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vS...ment-guide.pdf

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vS...tion-guide.pdf

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2108740

https://storagehub.vmware.com/t/vsan-space-efficiency-technologies/storage-efficiency-use-case-examples-1/

https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualbloc...ntenance-mode/

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vS...37E61ECE4.html

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vS...76E46B35F.html

Core VMware vSphere Functionality

The following list covers core VMware capabilities when vSphere is deployed with vSAN and Pure Storage.

Increase infrastructure availability and SLAs

Availability is a fundamental component within an infrastructure. The FlashArray global install base has achieved greater than six-nine’s of availability, which includes planned and unplanned downtime. In addition the FlashArray delivers 100% performance, through failure and maintenance, with non-disruptive updates delivered via Pure1. The following list covers the core tenant of availability when vSphere is deployed with vSAN and Pure Storage.

Simplify Operations at Scale

The benefits of Pure Storage are most obvious in the area of simplified operations at scale. The FlashArray is designed to be successfully operated by any member of the IT staff – be they a member of the VMware or a storage team. This unique benefit is achieved in part by the architecture and by removing storage configuration options and associated trade-offs found in storage arrays and hyper-converged platforms. With FlashArray, all data is automatically protected with N+2 erasure coding, is encrypted with AES-256 encryption, includes automatic noisy neighbor QoS, is deduplicated and compressed for cost savings while delivering consistent sub-millisecond latency through normal operations, failures and maintenance. This allows the FlashArray to simultaneously meet the requirements of performance-centric and cost-sensitive workloads, without any configuration requirements or the need for separate deployment silos. The only storage configuration options requiring administrative effort is configuring data protection policies, bandwidth and /or IOPs limiting QoS policies, naming and sizing volumes, and connecting storage to hosts –the latter can be automated via either the Pure vCenter plug-in, vRO or vRA.

Reduce TCO via Storage Efficiency

Pure Storage is widely recognized as offering the most robust set of data reduction technologies in the industry, commonly delivering 3X to 4X greater data reduction and up to 8X greater total storage efficiency than HCI platforms. Efficiency spans beyond data reduction to include UNMAP and storage architecture overheads like data protection (RAID), caches, failover and slack space capacity reservations. At the end of the day storage efficiency directly translates into cost savings be it in measured in terms of virtual machines (VMs) per rack unit (RU), TBs per RU, GBs per dollar.

Reduce TCO via Server Efficiency

Expanding beyond storage efficiency, one needs to consider the cost placed on server CPU and memory resources when deploying VMs on a hyper-converged platform like vSAN. The benefit of the FlashArray can be measured in terms of an increase in VMs per hypervisor node. This results in fewer servers and software licenses; greater VMs per RU, VMs for Rack/floor tile, and VMs per network switch port.

Networking Details

Security Certification Details