VMware VSAN Launch Q&A

VMware has today announced VSAN. Here are some highlights from the Q&A session:

VSAN will be GA at March 10 2014
vSphere 5.5 Update 1 will support VSAN GA
Beta VSAN upgrades to the GA release are not supported
VSAN is not a VSA. Performance is much better than any VSA
Pricing and packaging will covered on the GA date
Performance of VSAN scales linear as you add more hardware (extra nodes with storage)
Initial release of VSAN requires SSD and HDD. So using only SSD disks and no HDDs it not possible
VSAN use cases are for example: VDI, Tier 2/3 workloads and Disaster Recovery cases
VMware Horizon View will be supported in the GA release
The minimum for VSAN is 3 ESXi nodes and the maximum is 32 nodes
The minimum is 1 HDD and 1 SSD. The maximum is 35 HDDs and one SSD per 7 HDDs
Minimum NIC speed is 1 Gbps, recommended NIC speed is 10 Gbps
Replication is synchronously
Every seven HDDs needs a SSD. SSD and HDD Ratio is 1:10 (GB)
No de-dupe is supported in the GA version
Hardware vendors such as Dell, HP and Cisco will support VSAN as VSAN Ready nodes. Watch the VMware Compatibility Guide at GA. Link
You can build your own VSAN with certified hardware
There will be 13 pre configurations solutions available on the GA date

JBOD is not supported in the GA release
What is the difference with MS storage spaces: MS Storage spaces is presenting a file server from dedicated servers and JBODs. VSAN is object storage and doesn’t require dedicated servers, it uses the same servers you have for your compute, and other benefits like flash cache acceleration, storage policy management and automation and more.