Another free session I want to point out is the VSAN session by Vijay Ramachadran and Christos Karamanolis from VMware. You'll learn how VSAN works and see some under the covers functions that makes VSAN so exciting new technology for the near future.
They also brings the topic of price you're paying for magnetic disks and how many of IOPS you're gonna get? Not much. On the other hand, Flash devices which provides high IOPS, throughput and very low latency. The advantage of this hybrid aproach is obvious and we can found it in many modern storage arrays. But VSAN does this in software. It takes advantage of both – spinning disks and Flash, where placing as much as hot data on Flash while spreading multiple replicas across magnetic disks to assure resiliency in case of failure.
VMware VSAN leverages a mix of spinning magnetic disks and flash disks in each local server to create a pooled storage.
I have reported in detail on VSAN requirements and the architecture in my post here: VMware VSAN introduced in vSphere 5.5 – How it works and what’s the requirements?
There is no single point of failure as the distributed object-based RAIN architecture is the core of the system. In this first version of VMware vSAN, the distributed RAID 10 or RAIN10 algoritm is used. When guest OS executes write, VSAN writes not only on single disk but copies the replica to 1 or 2 additional disks.
You can test VSAN on single ESXi box by creating 3 nested hypervisors. I've created the walk through here:
- VMware VSAN configuration steps with nested ESXi hypervisors
- With a demo video here – VMware VSAN video
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.Here is the free VMworld Video Session: STO5391 – VMware Virtual SAN – 
Christos Karamanolis (VMware), Vijay Ramachandran (VMware). The session is 1H long.
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You can get hand on vSAN beta too ! Just register for a free download athttps://www.vsanbeta.com
