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.
I have a small cluster running using Starwind for my vSAN. For me it’s much cheaper than a hardware equivalent and is performant enough.
Oh and I haven’t had a “stop work” issue with it in 8 years.
Somewhat remarkably it was OK performance-wise when sync/iSCSI traffic were running on 1Gb copper connections to spinning rust storage… Now I have 10Gb fibre between the hosts, coupled with nvme drives, and it’s quite (comparatively) quick.
As with all things YMMV… But vSAN is the way for my use case.