Good Bye, VSA

As some of you may know, VMware VSA has gone end of life as of April, 2014. This applies to all flavors of VMware’s vSphere Storage Appliance. This does not mean that you have to stop using VSA… at least not immediately.

As long as you have an active support contract for VMware’s VSA, you are still entitled to contact support regarding any issues. However, you can no longer purchase VSA. So what exactly do this mean for those of us that have VSA in our environments? Now what?

While there is no replacement per se, there is however a better alternative. Yes, I said better. VMware engineers took the concept of VSA and created a much more robust solution. The new and improved solution is called VSAN or Virtual SAN. I am not saying by any means that VSAN is built on VSA code, I am saying that they share common use cases and solutions. Last I heard, VMware was coming up with a SKU for VSA to VSAN upgrade (I’m checking my sources).

VSAN is VMware’s software-design storage solution that allows for the use of local storage and leverages such storage not only for capacity purposes, but also for performance gains. VSAN caches reads/writes by utilizing server-side flash. There are tons of documents about VSAN and their use cases. I have included a few links from other blogs about VSAN.

So, while there is no direct/in-place upgrade available, there is a way to take your existing hardware, as long as your hardware meets the VSAN Hardware requirements, and transform it into your new VSAN solution. I’m in the process of doing this myself right now, so I will post steps as I go through this process.

In the meantime, you may want to check these links out:

• http://www.punchingclouds.com/
• http://www.yellow-bricks.com/virtual-san/
• http://www.vmware.com/products/virtual-san/

To be continued…