As IT leaders move away from VMware, they face a critical decision: do they stick with traditional storage architectures, or is now the time to finally unlock the full potential of an infrastructure that converges virtualization, storage, and networking technologies?
Early convergence efforts centered on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), where storage ran as a virtual machine under the hypervisor, commonly called a vSAN. While adoption has lagged behind traditional three-tier architectures, recent advancements have significantly improved vSAN, making it worth reconsidering by addressing past shortcomings.
The above is an ad, but it both open about it and technically interesting, if a bit repetitive.
I honestly had no idea a vSAN was primarily running on hidden storage VMs on the host. I thought the storage stack was as tightly integrated as networking/compute at the hypervisor level, so the light breakdown there was worth the read.
Not all of them. Ceph on Proxmox and (iirc) VMware vSAN run bare metal. That statement was a call-out post for Nutanix, which runs their storage inside a VM cluster. Both of these have been doing so for years.
Okay, that tracks better. Im familiar with ceph and promox using it as a “fake” vSAN. Im also familiar with Vmwares vSAN and had never seen any indicator of an internal storage VM, so that was odd.
It being Nutanix doing the above makes sense as I haven’t worked with them yet.
Out of curiosity why would you call Ceph a fake HCI? As far as I’ve seen, it behaves akin to any of the other HCI systems I’ve used.
Id call it viable hyper-converged infastructure when it in use as such like with proxmox, but its not scoped to just being a vSAN. Its a distributed storage network. its design is way wider than just being used for HCI/vSAN/etc.