Design Considerations for the VMware VSA
August 30, 2011 
Sean Crookston 
Just a quick write-up on some things to consider when designing a solution involving VMware’s new Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA). I am personally very excited to see an offering of the like as many customers are currently using other VSA products or similar solutions to accomplish what they need. Not everyone needs a dedicated SAN, but that doesn’t mean they can’t take advantage of some of the great features of vSphere like DRS.
If looking at designing a solution using the VSA you will want to take a look at the version 1.0 release notes.There are a lot of important details in their that if you don’t pay attention to could bite you in the long run. For example, with version 1.0 disk capacity can not be changed after setup. I’ve listed some other critical points I found below.
Host Sizing
- 6 GB Memory minimum with 24 GB reccomended
- 4 NICs
- Minimum of 4 disks and maximum of 8 per host(internal disks only, no DAS)
- These disks must be configured in a RAID 1/0, so be prepared to lose half of your disk capacity as a tradeoff to local protection via RAID 1/0. Additionally you are going to be replicating this storage to another host in the cluster, so be careful to consider that overhead in terms of your overall capacity.
- vSphere 5 ONLY
And I’ll leave this with one last reminder, check the HCL. As with any of the components of your hardware and your storage, you are going to want to check the HCL here for supportability.
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