VSAN Overview

VMware vSAN powers industry-leading hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions with vSphere-native, flash-optimized storage for private and public cloud deployments.

vSAN is a core building block for the Software-Defined Data Center.

This short, animated video provides a quick introduction to VMware vSAN including use cases and a few of the key technical features and benefits.

vSAN Datasheet – Seamlessly Evolve to Secure Hyperconverged Infrastructure.

Download VSAN Datasheet

Benefits of vSAN-powered Hyperconverged Infrastructure Solutions

Simple Evolution to Full-Stack HCI

Native to your hypervisor and leading clouds
Use existing tools for compute, storage, networking and more
Protect and optimize current investments

Broadest Flexibility

Certified solutions with your preferred vendor
Day one support of latest technologies
Unify resources under policy-based management

Multi-Cloud Capabilities

Consistent operations from edge to core to cloud
Intrinsic security for data-at-rest and in-flight
Hundreds of public cloud providers

Use Cases for vSAN

Business Critical Applications

Run your most critical business applications like Oracle, Exchange and SAP with enterprise reliability, security and performance. vSAN’s all-flash architecture can deliver 150K IOPS per node with sub millisecond latencies. More than 60% of our customers run their business-critical applications on vSAN. Learn more about vSAN and BCA testing in these reference architectures.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Reduce infrastructure costs by starting small and growing non-disruptively as your needs evolve. vSAN delivers high performance while lowering TCO over traditional storage arrays and allows IT to deliver desktop services to end users by running virtual machines on consolidated clusters in the data center. Learn more about VDI Workload testing in this evaluation paper.

Remote and Branch Office

Manage your remote and branch offices with little to no local IT staff. vSAN provides a simple, cost-effective, and highly available solution that can be centrally managed from the main data center. Customers can choose from vSAN’s flexible licensing of per VM or per CPU for greater flexibility and value. Learn more about vSAN for remote offices in this solution overview.

Disaster Recovery

Protect data, lower infrastructure costs and simplify disaster recovery (DR) operations and management in remote DR sites with little or no local IT staff. Combined with VMware Site Recovery Manager, vSAN and vSphere Replication can be used to orchestrate and automate the recovery of multiple virtual machines. Learn more about vSAN for DR in this solution overview.

Compare VSAN Versions

Compare vSAN editions to find the best option for your VMware hyperconverged infrastructure environment.

Standard Edition:
Best suited for hybrid environments so customers can simplify and automate storage management with per-VM storage policies.
Advanced Edition:
Standard Edition plus all-flash space efficiency features (deduplication, compression and erasure coding) provides the most cost-efficient performance to customers invested in all-flash.
Enterprise Edition:
Advanced Edition plus software-defined, data-at-rest encryption and stretched clusters delivers greater hardware choice and cost savings to customers.
Remote Office Branch Office Edition:
vSAN for ROBO is best suited for remote locations with low consolidation ratios. It is sold as 25-VM packs based on vSAN Standard, Advanced or Enterprise Editions and is distributable across the different remote sites. It is limited to a maximum of 25 virtual machines per site.
Desktop Edition: vSAN for Desktop provides a licensing option for VDI users. It is priced per concurrent user (CCU) in a VDI environment and sold in packs of 10 and 100 licenses. vSAN for Desktop is also included in the Horizon Advanced and Enterprise bundles which have the vSAN Advanced license.
HCI Kits Edition: VMware HCI Kits offer one SKU for both vSAN and vSphere and provide the most cost-efficient and simplest way to adopt hyperconverged infrastructure powered by vSAN.