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VMware vSAN provides both enterprise-class scale and performance supporting a wide variety of use cases and businesses of all types and sizes.

One of the popular use cases for VMware vSAN is running Business-Critical Applications (BCA). But in this case it’s not only running some workload in a virtual environment, but it’s also provide reference architecture, proven configurations and also the ability to use specific functions, like guest clustering.

For guest clustering one common requirement could be have a shared virtual disks. By default, a vSAN datastore helps ensure data integrity by preventing multiple virtual machines from writing to the same virtual disks, which poses a challenge for sharing disks. The multi-writer option enables multiple virtual machines from same or different ESXi host to simultaneous access a virtual disk on a vSAN datastore. This option helps provisioning storage for highly available applications that use a cluster filesystem. This feature has been available for VMFS datastore for quite few years and supported with vSAN since early days with the release of this KB 2121181.

Oracle products

The following highlights validate that vSAN is an enterprise-class storage solution suitable for running heavy Oracle workloads:

  • Predictable Oracle OLTP and DSS performance on vSAN with high availability.
  • Significant capacity savings with RAID 5 (erasure coding), deduplication and compression with negligible resource overhead and minimal impact on performance, lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO) and increasing price-performance.
  • Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) to administer storage resources combined with simple design methodology that eliminates operational and maintenance complexity of traditional SAN.
  • Sustainable solution for Tier-1 Database Management System (DBMS) application platform.
  • Validated architecture that reduces implementation and operational risks.

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Microsoft products

VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 enables customers and partners to host Microsoft business critical applications such as Exchange Server, SQL Server, SharePoint, etc with consistent performance levels and constant availability.

For more information see this technical paper that covers the design, and configuration of Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, SQL Server 2014, and SharePoint 2013: Microsoft Application on Virtual SAN

General information

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.