This Technical Evaluation Guide Whitepaper is technical guide to easily test VSA – vSphere Storage Appliance.
VMware vSphere 5 introduced new product which I think will become very popular for small businesses. The product is called vSphere Storage Appliance and it uses local disks of each ESXi host in the cluster to create a shared storage which then is used as a destination for storing Virtual Machines. This emulation of shared storage is done by installing VSA appliance on each server which participate in the cluster (2 or 3 nodes clusters are supported).
By leveraging the local disks on each host in the cluster small shops does not need to invest some big money into expensive SAN hardware and can still benefit of features like vMotion and High Availability (automatic restart of VMs in case of failure of a physical host in the cluster). The VSA is available as a part of vSphere 5 Essentials Plus package or as a standalone product (as an Add On for vCenter). Actually at the moment you can take advantage of 40% savings on vSphere Storage Appliance with Essentials Plus (my article on that) if you buy vSphere Essentials Plus together with VSA.
In this guide you'll discover the necessary requirements on how to setup the local RAID disks, and there are some step by steps and also some great screenshots as well..
The Free PDF which author is Cormac Hogan, guides you through the requirements and setup of the appliance in your environment.
Cormac Hogan is a senior technical marketing manager in the Infrastructure Product Marketing group at VMware. He was one of the first VMware employees at our EMEA headquarters in Cork, Ireland, back in April 2005. He spent two years as the technical support escalation engineer for storage before moving into a support readiness training role, where he developed training materials and delivered training to technical support and VMware support partners. He is currently responsible for technical marketing of core vSphere storage technologies, including the VSA.
Product documentation:
https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/
Online support:
https://www.vmware.com/support/
Support offerings:
https://www.vmware.com/support/services
Education services:
https://mylearn1.vmware.com/mgrreg/index.cfm
Support knowledge base:
https://kb.vmware.com
Enjoy… -:)
